Resurrection Express (10 page)

“No.”

“They’re big. You see ’em in movies a lot.”

“I haven’t been to a movie in over three years.”

“The ones about the wars over there are really terrible.”

“So they built a bunker rigged to blow and then what?”

“The vault was improvised by an infantry wirehead who was killed six weeks later, along with his laptop. They brought me in to figure it out, gave me three days before they dynamited the whole front entrance.”

“They blew a few billion back to God, just to open the piggybank?”

“Collateral damage, they called it.”

“Only people who think with their guns pull stupid stunts like that. Or people who want to rub out thieves.”

I look back at the specs on the laptop screen.

The monster.

“If you had been there, it would have been different,” she says. “They could have saved the money. I’ve never seen anybody who works like you do.”

“You’ve never seen me work.”

“Not up close, but I know a lot about you.”

“I guess everybody knows everybody in our line.”

“If you’re looking in the right places.”

As she speaks to me, I realize it wasn’t contempt in her eyes before. It was simply admiration, locked up tight behind a wall. Her youth is now obvious to me—just a few years, but hard years—and she has respect for my experience as a thief, my reputation in the hacker circles . . . but the whole thing makes me feel a little awkward. I sense her ability to turn her face and her heart to stone, under fire. They try real hard to teach you that in the military. Only a few of us can actually do it.

In bright light, she is a little bit stunning in her red beauty, the top half of her olive drab flight suit tied off at her waist, a galaxy of freckles against dark shoulders, exposed by a gray military tank top. Her form is cut in conservative feminine lines, her assets modest but very appealing. I try not to look for very long.

I can sense that’s been a career problem for her, more than once.

•  •  •

W
e work for hours, way into the night, and then into the morning, building the rig. We talk about her time as a soldier. We talk about her training. She says she knows who taught me. Axl Gange. She says the name with great reverence.

“That wasn’t what his mother called him,” I say, bent over a series of memory cards with a soldering iron, checking my work with a giant magnifying glass on a jointed steel arm. “He was a Guns N’ Roses fan. Always played that crap loud when we were working. His folks named him Norman. He never liked that.”

She bows her head, like she knows already. Looks at her feet, then looks me in the eye. “Do you know why I signed up for this?”

“You were gonna tell me a while ago.”

“Was I?”

“You said it was weird luck.”

“I guess that’s part of an answer.”

“You don’t like giving straight answers, do you?”

“There ain’t that many.”

She’s right about that. Nothing’s simple, not ever. I take my best guess:

“Someone in Jenison’s crew knew about you through the army grapevine, right? Probably that Rainone guy. And she offered you a truckload of money to come on the team?”

“The job does pay well. But that ain’t why I’m really here.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s Axl Gange. He was . . . close to me.”

“Are you related to him?”

She doesn’t answer me for a long, long moment.

I know Axl had three daughters and a son. I never met any of them. He never talked about them. I didn’t really know who Axl was outside of work.

“No,” she says, and it sounds like a lie. “But we were . . .
close
. When I was a lot younger. Before I went in the military. He taught me a few things, but not everything. I wanted to know more.”

“It’s none of my business.”

“It is a little. We have something in common. David Hartman killed our teacher.”

“Not many people know that.”

“I met a guy from the Army Corps of Engineers who worked for Hartman. He told me they tortured Axl to death.”

“Yes. That’s exactly what happened.”

I shut off the memory quickly, reducing it to dissonant information molecules. It’s the only way to deal with that.

“Axl was a good teacher,” I tell her. “When he died, I had to work for Hartman. For years. I had to shut up and do as I was told. That made me sick.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“He never said anything about you.”

“That don’t surprise me.” She gives a halfhearted wave-it-off with one hand, almost rolling her eyes.

“So you were gonna be a tech thief and you bailed to be a flyboy?”

“The air force was the only place I could complete my training for free.”

“Like I said . . . it’s none of my business.”

“I knew we would be going after David Hartman. And I knew you would be on the job. And I knew Axl trained you. It’s my way of getting even, I guess.”

“He was the best, no doubt about it.”

“I think it’s such a goddamned waste that he’s dead.”

“Most of the things they
don’t
teach you about in thief school were things Axl invented. Those are the things you only know if you meet a guy who was under his wing.”

“Like what?”

“Like you have to be a
mechanic,
for starters. A
real
mechanic. You know what the first thing he taught me was?”

She shakes her dark red head, smiling.

I solder a lead in place. Perfect connection. “He locked me in a room and told me to find my way out. Took me two days, but I finally figured how the hinges on the door were put together. He said I was a natural.”

“He never said that to me.”

“You didn’t know him long enough then. A woman with your skill set would have dazzled the hell out of Axl on a bad day.”

“That’s probably true.”

“I had to bust my ass before he was happy. He took me through locks first. Old school. You have to learn your ABCs before you get high-tech. Did anyone ever teach you how to escape from police-issue handcuffs without a lockpick?”

“No.”

It’s impossible. You at least need a bobby pin—or a talent for dislocating your thumbs.

“That was a trick question,” I tell her.

She almost smiles again. “Axl was full of tricks, wasn’t he?”

“Yes he was.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“You’re going to anyway.”

She folds her arms. “Hackers have to keep up with everything. It’s all mercurial, changes every few months. Everybody exchanges information. How did you keep up when you were in prison?”

“I had a laptop in there.”

“In maximum security?”

“Like I said, you have to know the old school.”

I don’t tell her about wiping the memory card and smashing the deck before I handed it back to the same weasel who smuggled it in for me. That was on the day Jenison showed up with Toni’s picture. I don’t tell her about keeping my data encrypted behind a wall of virus-infection security in an offsite location, or the Destroyer looking out for me, getting things set up with him in the two weeks before my release. I don’t tell her about the three hundred grand I may or may not still have in a safe deposit box at the Austin Bergstrom Airport, a few hundred miles from where we stand. Only the Fixer knew about that. He might be the last person ever to know.

She offers her hand seriously, all business now. “It’s an honor to be working with you, sir. I won’t let you down.”

I give her a small smile, but I don’t take her hand. “This isn’t the army and you don’t report to me. It’s Elroy.”

“Okay. Elroy.”

“Can I call you Alex?”

“I don’t like my first name. Bennett is fine.”

She looks right in my eyes now, and I can see the question lingering in her. She wants to know what I know about Axl. The details about how he died. It’s why she’s really here. Why she’s so serious about all this.

I could give her that. I could tell her all about the blood and the mayhem and Hartman’s sick, twisted grin, beaming across a room tangled in smoke and sweat and screaming. I could explain the horror of watching your elders die slowly. The shame and the guilt, the endless spiral of rage.

I can’t give her that.

It would give her nightmares for the rest of her life.

So I shake her hand instead.

When I do it, I wonder if she’s Axl’s daughter.

•  •  •

T
hat night, I sit on the edge of my bed and stare at the photo. Toni and the girl, and Hartman with them. Jenison gave me a thumb drive with a digital file, containing all the pictures her undercover man snapped, but none of them are important to me like this one is. Because I can tell that’s her. Even though I can’t see her at all.

What are you thinking about in this moment, Toni? Are you thinking of me?

That poor little girl in the picture with her. I don’t even know her name. Jenison’s daughter.

I close my eyes and imagine that I am in the room with them: the smell of cigarettes and high-dollar weed, booze and sweat, the thump-boom-crackle of the rave club beat, good guys and bad guys and people who mean nothing to no one, all dancing and yelling and scamming and loving . . . and in the center of it all . . .

David Hartman.

The monster who stole everything.

Right there, barking orders to my one true love, and a little girl caught up in a karaoke disco-ball nightmare. The music is noise that distracts me. I open my eyes and I look harder. Until my eyes can’t look anymore. Until the line between the photo and my dreaming world blurs. And I am lost. Restlessly lost. Down and down . . .
and
 . . .

•  •  •

I
’m back to that night.

The night of our last job together—me and Toni, and my father.

This all happened so long ago.

The good old days, about to end badly.

That’s where you always sat, right at the edge of everything. The risk always sniping at you, the sick thrill of losing it all. The abyss, yawning deep below. We used to call it a Coffin Run—those shotgun-crazy suicide assaults that nobody goes near, not unless they’re like us. Unless they’re really good at sensing the chinks in thick armor, sniffing out weaknesses, knowing where to hit hard and how to fade away when the smoke clears. It always helps when you’re protected by the syndicate going in, but even that doesn’t mean a damn thing if you’re hitting especially dangerous people. So you work it real careful. You plot things to the letter. You take a cowboy job and you lace it with military precision. That makes you damn near invincible.

And that always started with Toni.

Secret Agent Toni—Bond Girl Toni.

The guy we were going after was one of those fat old-timers with a thing for young flesh—a lot of them are. It’s kind of a cliché, really. But the old methods work best, even in the high-tech future.

And why?

Because those old-timers never keep their cash in banks.

Money laundering gets you get caught—history proves it, the feds count on it. Coming back on mob assholes in court with tax-evasion charges is the one way to make damn sure every one of them do hard time in the end. As far as the IRS is concerned, you’re guilty until proven innocent when there’s a river of dirty money flowing through traceable channels. All that goes away if you dig a big hole and bury all your cash there.

We were standing right over the big hole.

And she was casting her line and reeling the old man in like a prize fish, gaffed and helpless.

I was sitting in the truck, twenty miles away from the nightclub, watching him on my screens. His face, a pockmarked artery of age and secrets and murder, carved in thick ugly gashes, his eyes wide and drunk and crisscrossed with jagged red lightning bolts, all brought into my tiny flip-up console with digital perfection from the six invisible eyes placed in her hair and her jewelry. My fingers racing across the keys, commanding software programs that mapped patterns in his irises, cracking the code hidden there. It took only six minutes. Then I had the key to the vault’s first lock, built easy from the high-definition scan. Those retina identification panels are easy to fool, even when you don’t have direct digital access to the guy’s bloodshot baby blues. I used to call it eyeballing your way in. Toni’s hidden cameras made it a walk in the park.

She kept the old man on a real short leash all night long, brought him in close so his breath fogged my cameras, his hands crawling all over her. The magnetic scanner in her locket found the three Black Visas and the iPhone in his jacket within seconds but it took a little longer to break the pin numbers. Well-off people carry Platinum cards, but dirty rich depravos pack the Black, baby—and they’re always hard. The cell number was easier. Pay dirt number two. Smartphones and credit card accounts are clear windows into every mobster’s life. You ride the signal like
a rainbow, straight to his pot of gold. You use forged passwords and code clones to break through back doors and private e-mail accounts, all that cyber-jazz interlaced and moving faster than the speed of light—all easy to manipulate and bring under a series of simple commands, when you know how it works. What I needed then was the charm bracelet that governed the outer-security array of his fifty-acre estate in the Bellaire Green subdivision of Dallas. Cluster upon cluster of laser beams and motion detectors, wrapped up in a state-of-the-art Gordian knot of electronic deadfalls and hardwire booby traps, not to mention about twenty guys with guns. The smartphone was my key to the kingdom. I had the knot untangled within ten minutes. Toni fixed him with her smile and worked it easy, as the music in the nightclub pounded hard in my headset.

I hate music.

It’s like jagged shockwaves in a sea of logic. Like the ringing in my head, since I was shot there. People in Austin talk endlessly about how Beethoven is hard and rough, how Mozart is light and frothy. They talk about jazz and trip-hop and how white people shouldn’t play the blues, unless you’re Stevie Ray. Me, I want it all to shut up so I can do my work. I hear the patterns in dead silence. And when a sound happens, I know it really means something.

Like the signal from my father, that his men were in position. Ready for my all-clear. Twelve guys in ninja black waiting in the dark just outside the reach of motion detectors, twenty miles away from the club where Toni worked her magic, the old man inviting her for a spin in his new car. A false pulse, just for three seconds, from my console to the main security booth, telling their computer to open the gate.