Meaner Things (14 page)

12.

CASING THE JOINT

The next morning I filled my backpack and took the Canada Line downtown. This time I approached the Zheng Building from the side, and walked slowly past the underground garage entrance. It had the usual automatic barrier, a long piece of yellow and black wood stretched across the driveways in and out. In a small green hut, with windows on all sides, a garage attendant watched as building occupants swiped their card and triggered the barrier arm. I knew he was there during the day but not at night. Boylan had told me that any renters wanting in and out after hours had to swipe their card and open an automatic gate. This was just one of many things that I had still to investigate.

I strode past the crooked name sign on the concrete block and under the electronic eye that was watching me from above the automatic glass doors, and reminded myself that from here on I had to stay ‘in character’ at all times. Inside, the foyer security guard, identification badge clipped to the breast pocket of his jacket, paid me not the slightest attention. On my right was a wall of locked mailboxes, one of which had my office’s number on it, and straight ahead were the waist-high turnstiles through which everyone entering or leaving the building had to pass.

I swiped my tenant’s card in the slot and passed through. There was now an electronic record that identified me as having entered the building as this precise time. This sort of invasive measure fitted perfectly with Zheng’s obsessive-compulsive personality, something I looked forward to sending shock waves through in due course.

The security control room on my left was fronted by a huge plate glass window. I slowed as I passed it and peered inside using the periphery of my vision. Computer monitors displayed images from the plethora of internal cameras through which just about every hallway and open space in the building could be observed. Extrapolating from the number of cameras I’d noted so far, and using an average per floor of the building, I estimated there were about twenty internal cameras in all, plus at least two outside the building, over the front and garage entrances.

Past the security room, a corridor with marbled walls and recessed lighting held the building’s five elevators. I stepped into the first one and pressed the button for the twelfth floor. In the narrow hallway leading to my office I noted numerous scratches on the grimy, off-white walls, the sort created by careless workmen when moving office furniture. The contrast to the ground floor was startling.

Inside Room 1207 I could finally relax. There were no cameras here. I pulled off the wig and vigorously scratched my itchy head before flopping into the chair behind the desk. The room was depressing me already and it was where I would have to spend many hours of my time in the days ahead. It might arouse suspicion if my computerised pass records were checked and they showed that I spent precious little time in the building. My real work lay outside this drab office but I couldn’t spend hours every day wandering around the corridors.
That
really would arouse suspicion.

I thought about Volumes Books and Mr. Barnes. The day after getting beaten up I’d called him and resigned. He hadn’t seemed the least bit surprised. In fact, from the tone of his voice it was obvious that he was relieved, maybe even as overjoyed as I was. Of course, he pretended to be inconvenienced.
You’ve
put
me
in
a
very
awkward
position
with
this
lack
of
due
notice
,
Malone
,
blah
,
blah
,
blah
. . .

Of course, this meant that I now had no income at all. Thankfully, Emma and Charlie were both still flush and were subsidising me, and this entire enterprise, until completion.

I took the day’s
Vancouver
Sun
out of my briefcase and read everything of interest in it from first page to last. Crosswords or Sudoku had never interested me, so I ignored those. Afterwards I took out an A4 refill pad and wrote down everything I’d learned so far, drew some sketches and prepared a long ‘to do’ list. None of this stimulated any fresh ideas.

I reminded myself that it was early days yet and moved the chair over to the end window. The view was terrible, but it was better than staring at the wall.

*

The place was so poorly ventilated that I dropped off to sleep and awoke, bleary-eyed and stiff, a couple of hours later. I put the wig and glasses back on, examined my face in a small mirror I carried in the bag, and set off for the elevator where I pressed the button for Floor -2.

The bell pinged and the doors slid apart. I felt nervous down here, right in the belly of the beast, but the best way around that was to get to work. That meant keeping my eyes wide open, observing all relevant details and memorising them for recording later.

The first thing I’d noticed was that, of the five elevators, only three came down here to the bottom floor, the other two going no lower than the foyer. Of course, this included the one I had stepped into first, only to find that there weren’t any ‘-1’ or ‘-2’ buttons. I couldn’t think of any reason for this discrepancy, other than some vague concession to security, but all such construction idiosyncrasies had to be noted.

The only decoration on the walls of the small foyer in front of me was a framed diagram of the fire escape route, conveniently displaying a stairwell from the foyer that led down to this room. I quickly located it directly opposite the elevator doors. The hard tiles underfoot amplified each step I took as I approached the vault.

When the time came I’d wear soft-soled running shoes.

I stopped in front of the day gate and noted the intercom keypad and another keypad that activated the magnetic alarm beside the vault door. A steel pipe, no doubt containing electric cables, extended from above the magnet and vanished into the ceiling. None of these things looked ‘state of the art’ or even particularly new; they had probably been fitted at least a decade ago and never updated. That gave me a little hope.

I pressed the day gate intercom and waited. As this was the first time I’d done this alone I expected to have to go through a formal process of recognition, answer some questions into the intercom, maybe hold up my tenant’s pass card to the camera. The guards in the security room above wouldn’t let just anyone in.

The door in front of me clicked open.

I was surprised and pleased. Security in the building had obviously become routine over the years, to the point that anyone standing at the day gate was assumed to be a
bona
fide
tenant of the building. That that sort of slackness had become ingrained was very, very good news indeed. It didn’t solve any of the technical challenges but it exposed the human element as vulnerable.

I took my time and examined the door jamb as I entered, looking for signs that it too was alarmed. Again, things looked good: it didn’t appear so. I couldn’t be absolutely sure and made a mental note to keep checking it on subsequent visits.

The door hissed closed behind me on its pneumatic hinges and I walked to my safe deposit box, number 1207, two thirds of the way down on the left hand wall. Boylan had given me a key for it yesterday, a kind I’d never seen before, with an individually numbered oval handle and a five centimetres long round shank, ending in a series of complex metal bits extending from opposite sides. My box, identical to all the others, had a horizontal slot for the key on the left side of the door. Three brass-coloured knobs, each with the twenty-six letters of the alphabet around its dial, were aligned to the right of the keyhole.

I dialled my three-letter code, E-M-A, inserted the key and turned it clockwise. A brass deadbolt inside the lock retracted from its slot in the door jamb and the door swung open on its internal hinges. I opened and closed the lock a few times, keeping the door open, and noted that the deadbolt was about two and a half centimetres long, five centimetres tall, and a centimetre or so thick. I filed another mental note to take exact measurements later and decided I’d done enough on my first solo visit.

On the way back up I met Boylan in the elevator. We nodded acknowledgement to each other and I wondered if I should say something. But reading the vacant expression on his face told me that he’d probably forgotten my name already, which was all to the good. It meant that he’d soon forget the rest of the details I’d told him about myself.

Back in the office I transcribed my mental notes while they remained fresh in my mind. So far everything had gone better than anticipated. I had infiltrated Zheng’s headquarters without suspicion, had access to the vault during working hours, and access to most of the rest of the building whenever I liked.

An outline of a plan was already beginning to form in my mind. There were two ways into the building, the front and garage doors, but the latter was the only one used by tenants after regular hours. So that’s how we’d do it. We’d still have to dodge video surveillance, enter the locked building without being detected, and sidestep the night-time security guard. And that would be the ‘easy’ part. We’d then still have to somehow penetrate the gigantic vault door and day gate, bypass the light and motion detectors, crack open a hundred safe deposit boxes and make off with as much of their contents as we could carry. All this without alerting the security guard or exposing ourselves to identification on the battery of closed circuit TV cameras.

Not exactly a walk in the park. But a few ideas were slipping into place and, now that I was in, I found the challenge of the heist itself tremendously exciting. When I’d stood inside the vault I could almost feel the adrenaline surging through me.

I’d figure the rest out eventually.

*

I showed my safe deposit box key to Charlie that night.

“Can you make a master key out of it?” I asked.

He put on a pair of little wire glasses and peered down his nose so closely at the key that I thought he was about to bite it.

“Nope,” he concluded.

“Care to elaborate?” I said, when nothing more was forthcoming from his lips.

“It’s a complicated key,” he said. “If I touch it with a file it will stop working altogether. It’s not the key to the mop cupboard you know.”

“OK, so any other suggestions?”

He shook his head. “Not really, but we can forget about making a master key. It will have to be some other way.”

I thought for a minute. “The keyhole goes all the way through. Maybe that’s a vulnerability.”

“Howdya mean?”

“It goes right through and out the other side.”

“So?”

“Well . . . that could be our way into the boxes, couldn’t it?”

Charlie looked puzzled. “You want to squirt acid into them or something? I guess it would ruin paper bills and bonds and stuff but it won’t affect diamonds. More to the point, it won’t get us access to them.”

I leaned forward, excited by where my thoughts were leading. “I’m thinking more along these lines: could we make some kind of lever, one that would go right through the keyhole?”

“How would that work?”

“Like this.” I mimed the action in the air with my hands. “We insert a slim cylindrical lever, which opens out two prongs on the far side to secure it. It’s attached to a mechanism clamped tight to the door. When we turn a handle it increases pressure until the bolt in the door gets pulled right out.”

Deep furrows creased Charlie’s forehead. “Sounds complicated,” he said. “Would take one hell of a strong device to do it.” Then a grin slowly appeared.

“I’ll start working on it in the morning.”

13.

MAN PURSE

I felt ridiculous carrying the thing. It was quite heavy too, due to all the electronic gadgetry that Charlie had crammed into it. I’d told him all I wanted was a video camera that could record a clear, sharp image, and go on doing so for several hours if necessary. He mustn’t even have heard me.

It was the first time in my life that I’d carried a man purse, and probably the last. I smiled vaguely in the direction of a burly businessman as he waddled past me, careful not to meet his eyes. My fellow tenants must have no reason to remember me; I had to be as drab and anonymous as possible.

The strap cut into my shoulder as I swung the little black leather satchel around, trying to make it seem as if it was light, with only documents or maybe an iPad inside. It had a wide bottom and a handle on top – as I said, a stupid man purse – and I had to keep one hand on the handle to point the hidden camera in the right direction. The tiny hole in the side was barely noticeable even when you knew it was there. A minor masterpiece of Charlie construction.

I roamed the building and filmed security features, as planned, before retiring to my office on the twelfth floor. The office was a bare as it was when I had walked into it for the first time three days earlier. Not much point in furnishing it, especially as everything in the room would eventually have to be wiped clean of fingerprints. I tootled around on my iPod for a while, then rested my head on my folded arms on top of the desk and dozed for a couple of hours. It was a long day, but I didn’t have to stay for all of it – a ‘wholesaler’ like me could be expected to pop in and out of the building at irregular times.

I left mid afternoon and got to Charlie’s house at five to four. I’d texted ahead and he was waiting for me at the front door. He grabbed the bag without even saying ‘Hello’ and disappeared with it into another room that he wouldn’t let me enter. I sipped tap water from a well-rinsed tumbler in the kitchen and waited.

I guess I dozed off again, due to the stress or whatever. The next thing I knew he was standing scowling over me, waving the small video camera in my face.

“Useless!” His mouth opened and closed silently a few times, as if words were literally failing him.

“What’s up, Chuck?” I ventured, deciding to pour fuel on his fire. Charlie hated being called Chuck.

“The film you took, it’s useless,” he spluttered, “Can’t see a thing.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“You useless turd, you spent two hours videotaping the walls and ceiling. If you want to get the security stuff, you have to point the camera at them first.”

“Didn’t I?”

By now he was well and truly beetroot-faced. “Haven’t I just said that? And not only did you point it wrong, you bounced up and down the whole time too. Having a little jig were you? Maybe you had to do the fucking pee-pee dance?”

I couldn’t help it, I burst out laughing. To Charlie’s credit, he calmed down pretty quickly after that, although he still didn’t see the funny side of it.

“I’ll do it over again, Charlie. Don’t worry; it’s only a day lost. Take this as my practice round.”

“OK,” he replied, placated at last, “From here on I strongly suggest you carry the bag under your armpit. And walk slowly to keep it from jiggling. Got that?”

“Got it. But you’ll have to take the handles off. After a while they hurt too much.”

“I can do that. You’d better practise for a while around the house; and don’t dare drop it.”

I wandered from room to room with the man purse sandwiched tightly under my armpit, twisting my body to angle the lens upwards to point at the corners of each room. An hour and a half later, Charlie finally let me stop. He took the bag and examined the results while I waited, nervously this time. I’d had more than enough video-taping for one day.

The kitchen door opened and Charlie came in, camera in hand.

“Well . . . ?” I said.

He frowned and said nothing, just gave me a reluctant thumbs-up and handed me back the man purse.

*

I got to the Zheng Building nice and early the next morning. Though I didn’t really need to go there, I took the elevator up to my office just in case anyone was observing me on a security camera. It was what a real tenant would do. After sitting around for a few minutes inside, deep breathing and calming myself, I carefully adjusted the man purse under my armpit and tightened the strap around my shoulder so that the bag couldn’t budge. The electronics inside the soft leather bit into my underarm. I slowly made my way to the nearest elevator, making sure it was one of the two that went all the way down to the vault floor, and practised some video-taping angles and poses as I descended.

When the elevator doors slid open, revealing the stark white foyer in front of the vault, I panned the camera around the room to capture its layout and features. I approached the day gate and pointed the man purse at the security camera above my head, keenly aware that I was filming them filming me.

Remembering Charlie’s wrath, I took care to keep the camera steady and aim it well. One thing that hadn’t occurred to me last night was that the ceilings in this building were higher than the ones in Charlie’s house. That meant the video cameras were higher up than I’d practised for, and I struggled to direct the concealed lens upwards to get good footage. It would have been easy if I could have just held the bag out and pointed it, but of course I couldn’t do that. Instead, I had to tilt my upper body back at an extreme angle that must have looked as if I was in the early stages of an epileptic fit. Or it would have if I could have held such an awkward position for longer than a second or two.

I was buzzed through the day gate and once inside the vault was able to film more openly. There were no guards in here and no video cameras either. Probably using tenant privacy concerns as a cover, Zheng had ensured that no visual records existed of precisely what he was storing and removing from his safe deposit boxes. But this not only suited him; it also suited me very well indeed.

I filmed the interior of the vault, paying special attention to the motion detector on the wall on the left side of the room and the light detector attached to the ceiling. Then I opened my safe deposit box and filmed it inside and out. I took a tape measure from my pocket and recorded the precise dimensions of the door, the deadbolt, the keyhole, and the interior of the box itself, writing the details in a tiny notebook I’d brought for the purpose.

There wasn’t much else left to do. I felt the wall with my fingertips, tapped it with a knuckle and even stuck my ear tight against it. As far as I could tell, it was solid concrete. That meant it could be cut through, given heavy power tools and plenty of time. I quickly dismissed the idea: my research told me that these walls and floor were highly likely to be imbedded with seismic sensors that would be triggered by any attempts to drill or dig into the vault. I’d have to find another way in.

I heard the elevator doors open. Someone was coming. I quickly finished up and tucked the man purse back under my arm.

The day gate buzzer sounded and another tenant came into the vault, an elderly man with long white hair, slightly stooped and wearing a very expensive dark blue pinstripe suit. I closed my deposit box as he entered, gave him a curt nod in passing, and tried to film the vault door as best I could as I exited through it.

*

I made up my mind that I never wanted to have to carry the stupid little purse ever again, so spent the rest of the day wandering around the public areas of the building, filming everything I thought it might be useful to have on tape. With the purse cocked tightly under my arm I had to keep tilting my upper body back at the same awkward angle, until at one point I was sure I’d pulled a muscle.

I rested for a while in my office and left around three o’clock. It was a quiet time of day and I decided to film one last panoramic shot of the foyer, taking in the hallway leading off to the elevators. I stood in the middle and turned in a very slow circle, pivoting around on the backs of my heels, keeping my body as stiff as possible.

“Something wrong, sir?”

I nearly fell over. It was the security guard at the front door. He must have seen me pirouetting like an idiot and come inside to investigate. My mind whirled.

“I seem to have forgotten something,” I muttered, scratching my head as if trying to recall it. “Sorry to alarm you.”

He gave me a pitying look. “Not at all, sir.”

I pushed my bottom lip up a bit and tried to look wide eyed and high on something illegal. “I had a bit of a bender last night and it’s made me absentminded today.”

“Lack of sleep does that, eh?”

“Yes, I’ll just be on my way now.”

“Good afternoon, sir. Take care.”

I walked slowly out the door and hoped I’d done enough to fool him.

*

I dropped the camera off at Charlie’s and he seemed pleased to see me. The tension between us had gone and I was glad of that. I reminded myself that it was actually a good thing that he was being fussy about the proper use of his electronic toys. He took the camera away to check the film and I must have done well as he came back smiling.

“Good job, Mike. I have what I need now.”

I acknowledged the praise but didn’t stick around. My body felt achy and sore, as if I’d worked out too hard, and I attributed it to delayed stress from the foyer incident. I got home shortly after five and sat on the bed, my back propped against the wall, a big glass of chilled French Chardonnay in my hand. Despite the mess I’d made of filming the foyer, I knew I’d made really good progress otherwise. Now I needed an evening free from planning the heist, a few hours when I could relax and forget about cameras, locks and alarms.

I had to see Emma. It had been far too long since the last time, when we’d met covertly at her place. I picked up the phone to call her then my tiredness led me to do something extremely reckless. I put the phone down again and decided to make her a surprise visit.

Twenty minutes later I stood at the end of the block where she lived. My eyes scanned the area in front of her building. No black BMW, no Wark, no other signs of danger. I estimated that I could get inside in a minute or less. Unless I was extraordinarily unlucky and Wark drove up during precisely that minute, what could go wrong? I needed to see her.

I walked quickly up to the front entrance of her building and buzzed her suite. Long seconds ticked by. Was she out? That was perfectly possible, so why hadn’t I seriously thought about it? I buzzed again, keeping the button depressed to a count of ten. At last I heard her voice.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me, Mike. Let me in.”

She didn’t say anything else, but the door clicked open and she was waiting for me at her suite. I stepped inside.

“Wait a sec,” was all she said. I took off my shoes in the hallway as she closed her living room blinds all the way across the curving, north facing wall then came back to me.

“Why are you here?” she said sharply.

“Don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong.”

She frowned. “Did anybody see you?”

“No, I’m sure of it.” This clipped exchange was hardly the warm, passionate welcome I’d imagined.

“I thought we agreed that you wouldn’t come here?”

“Relax, it’s OK. It’s been a tough day. I had to see you, that’s all.”

She seemed to thaw at that point and at last I got the embrace I needed.

“I’m just scared, Mike. But I’m glad you’re here.”

We separated and went on into the living room.

“I worry that he’s got a telescope trained on me,” she explained, pointing at the blinds, “And that there’s still a bug in here.”

“Charlie would have found it,” I said. “Anyway, didn’t you change the locks?”

“Yes, but maybe there’s one that Charlie didn’t detect.”

“I’ll get him to come back, do another sweep if you like,” I said in my most reassuring voice.

She shrugged. “Guess I’m just getting paranoid. Anyway, sit down. How’d it go today?”

I stretched out on the couch and told her about the filming problems and my encounter with the security guard. I was just about to relay the happy ending when I heard a scraping sound at her suite door. A sound like a key in a lock.

Emma looked at the door aghast. I followed her gaze and saw the door start to open. By then I was already diving behind the big screen television in the corner. Emma rushed to the door as I squirmed in behind the television. I watched in horror as Zheng walked in, Wark, his human baboon, following behind.

“Whaaa . . . what are you doing here?” Emma stammered.

“Get out of my way,” Zheng replied.

My hiding place was useless and I knew it. The big, flat screen was on a low table and there was a gaping space between the bottom of the television and the table top. The moment Zheng walked into the living room I was doomed and, with Wark here, there’d be no escape. I looked around frantically. There was nothing but window and nine pitiless storeys of height behind me. Then I noticed that where the outside window ended there was an internal window area between the living room and the dining room patio next to it. But, unless I smashed the glass, there was no way to get through it.