Strangers (51 page)

Faye said, “No, Ernie, wait. Don’t run from it.”

Stepping in front of Ernie, putting a hand on the man’s chest to halt him, Dom said, “You have nightmares. When you wake up, you can’t remember what they were, except they had something to do with the moon.”

Faye gasped.

Ernie opened his eyes in surprise. “How’d you know that?”

“I’ve had nightmares for over a month,” Dom said. “Every night. And I know a man who suffered from them so bad he killed himself.”

They stared at him in astonishment.

“In October,” Dom said, “I started walking in my sleep. I’d creep out
of bed, hide in closets, or gather weapons to protect myself. Once, I tried to nail the windows shut to keep something out. Don’t you see, Ernie, I’m afraid of something in the dark. I’ll bet that’s what you’re afraid of, too. Not just the dark itself but something else, something specific that happened to you”—he gestured toward the windows—“out there in the darkness on that same weekend, the summer before last.”

Still baffled by this turn of events, Ernie glanced at the night beyond the windows, then immediately looked away. “I don’t understand.”

“Let’s go upstairs, where you can draw the drapes,” Dom said. “I’ll tell you what I know. The important thing is you aren’t alone in this. You’re not alone anymore. And, thank God, neither am I.”

New Haven County, Connecticut

Clockwork. Jack Twist’s heists always ticked along like clockwork mechanisms. The armored-car job was no exception.

The night was solidly roofed with clouds. No stars, no moon. No snow was falling, but a cold moist wind swept up from the southwest.

The Guardmaster truck rumbled past empty fields, coming from the northeast toward the knoll from which Jack had watched it Christmas Eve. Its headlights bored through thin ragged sheets of patchy winter fog. In the snow-wrapped fields, the county lane resembled a strip of black satin ribbon.

Dressed in a white ski suit with hood, Jack lay half buried in snow, south of the roadway, across from the knoll. On the other side of the road, at the foot of the knoll, the second member of the team, Chad Zepp, also in white camouflage, sprawled in another drift.

The third member of the team, Branch Pollard, was halfway down the knoll with a Heckler and Koch HK91 heavy assault rifle.

The truck was two hundred yards away. Refracting the headlights, fog formations drifted across the road, into the lightless fields.

Suddenly the muzzle of the HK91 flashed up on the hillside. A shot cracked above the sound of the grinding engine.

The HK91, perhaps the finest combat rifle made, could fire hundreds of rounds without jamming. Extremely accurate, effective at a thousand yards, the HK91 could put a 7.62 NATO round through a tree or concrete wall, with sufficient punch left to kill someone on the other side.

Tonight, however, they did not intend to kill anyone. Aided by an infra-red telescopic sight, Pollard put the first shot where he wanted it, blowing out the right front tire of the Guardmaster transport.

The truck swerved wildly. Encountering ice, it began to slide.

Even while the armored transport was sliding, its fate unsettled, Jack was up and running. He leaped a ditch and dashed onto the road in front of the vehicle, which loomed like a tank. At the last moment, when it seemed bound inexorably for the ditch, the driver regained control and brought the truck to a jerky halt thirty feet from Jack.

He saw one of the Guardmaster crewmen talking excitedly into a radio handset. That call for help was futile. The moment Pollard had fired from the knoll, Chad Zepp, still concealed in the snow north of the road, had switched on a battery-powered transmitter, jamming the transport’s radio frequency with shrill electronic static.

As the rising wind harried fog-ghosts past Jack, he stood in the middle of the road, feeling naked in the blazing headlights, taking time to aim the tear-gas rifle at the truck’s grille. The gun was of British manufacture, designed for anti-terrorist squads. Other tear-gas weapons fired grenades that spewed disabling fumes on impact, requiring the marksman to aim at windows. But upon seizing an embassy, terrorists usually boarded up the windows. The new British gun, which Jack had acquired from a black-market arms dealer in Miami, had a two-inch bore and fired a high-velocity, steel-jacketed tear-gas
shell
that could penetrate most wooden doors or punch through a boarded window. When Jack fired, the shell smashed through the truck’s grille into the engine compartment. A noxious yellow vapor began roiling into the cab by way of its ventilation system.

The guards had been trained to remain in their secure roost in a crisis, for the cab had steel doors and bulletproof glass. But when they switched off the heater and closed the vents too late, they found themselves choking in the gas-filled cabin. They opened their locked doors, spilled out into the cold winter night, wheezing, coughing.

In spite of the blinding, suffocating gas, the driver had drawn his revolver. Dropping to his knees, gagging, he squinted his copiously watering eyes in search of a target.

But Jack kicked the gun out of his hand, grabbed him by the coat, and dragged him to the front of the truck, where he handcuffed him to a support strut on the bumper.

After firing the shot that disabled the truck, Branch Pollard had sprinted down the knoll. Now, at the other end of the front bumper, he handcuffed the other protesting guard to another strut.

Both guards were blinking furiously, trying to clear their gas-blurred vision to get a look at their attackers’ faces, but that was wasted effort because Jack, Pollard, and Zepp were wearing ski masks.

Leaving the securely shackled men, Jack and Pollard ran to the back of the truck, moving fast, though not because they feared being seen by
other traffic on that lonely road. No traffic would pass until they were gone. The moment the Guardmaster unit had entered the flats, the last two members of the robbery team, Hart and Dodd, had sealed off both ends of the road with stolen vans that had been repainted and equipped with Department of Highway signs. Against an impressive backdrop of emergency beacons flashing on the roofs of their vans and on sawhorses they had set out on the pavement, Dodd and Hart would turn back everyone who wanted through, spinning a tale of a tanker-truck accident.

Clockwork.

When Jack and Pollard got to the rear of the truck, Chad Zepp was already there. In the glow of a battery-powered light that he had fixed to the truck with a magnet, Zepp was unscrewing the faceplate that covered the lock mechanism on the doors to the cargo hold.

They had brought explosives, but when trying to peel a truck as well-constructed as the Guardmaster, there was a risk that explosives would fuse the lock pins, sealing the honeypot even tighter. They had to try going in through the lock, leaving explosives as a last resort.

Some older armored cars had locks that operated with a key or pair of keys, and some had combination dials, but this was a new vehicle with state-of-the-art equipment. This lock was engaged and disengaged by pressing a sequence of code numbers on a ten-digit keyboard that was the size and appearance of the “dial” on a touch-tone telephone. To activate the lock, the guard closed the doors and simply punched in the middle number of the three-number code. To deactivate it, he pressed all three numbers in the correct order. The code was changed every morning, and of the two men crewing the truck, only the driver knew it.

There were one thousand possible three-number sequences in ten digits. Because it would take between four and five seconds to key in each sequence and wait for it to be accepted or rejected, they would have to delay at least an hour and a quarter to try every combination. That was far too risky.

Chad Zepp removed the faceplate from the lock. The ten numbered buttons remained, but now it was possible to see a bit of the mechanism between and behind them.

Hung on a strap from Zepp’s shoulder was a battery-powered, attaché-sized computer, which could assess and control the circuitry of electronic locks and alarms. It was SLICKS, an acronym for Security Lock Intervention and Circumvention Knowledge System. Intended solely for military or intelligence-agency personnel with security clearance, SLICKS was unavailable to the public. Unauthorized possession was a criminal violation of the Defense Security Act. To obtain a SLICKS, Jack had gone to Mexico City and had paid twenty-five thousand dollars to a black-market
arms dealer who had a contact inside the firm that manufactured the device.

Zepp unslung the computer and held it so he and Jack and Pollard could see the four-inch-square video display, which was dark. Three retractable probes were slotted in the SLICKS, and Jack withdrew the first of these from its niche: It looked like a copper-tipped steel thermometer on a two-foot wire umbilical. Jack looked closely at the partially exposed guts of the electronic lock and carefully inserted the slender probe between the first two buttons, touching it to the contact point at the base of the button marked “1.” The display screen remained dark. He moved the probe to button number 2, then 3. Nothing. But when he touched number 4, a pale green word—CURRENT—appeared on the screen, plus numbers that measured trace-electricity in the contact.

This meant that the middle number of the three-digit lock code was 4. After loading sacks of money and checks into the cargo-hold at the last stop on the route, the driver had pushed 4 to activate the lock. The contact point of that button would remain closed until the entire code was punched in, thereby unlocking the door.

With three unknown numbers, the possible combinations had been one thousand. But now that they needed to find only the first and last numbers, the search was reduced to one hundred combinations.

Ignoring the howling wind, Jack withdrew another instrument from the SLICKS. This was also on a two-foot cord but resembled a watercolor brush though with a single bristle. The bristle glowed with light and was thicker than a sixty-pound fishing line, stiff yet flexible. Jack inserted it into a crack at the base of the 1 button on the lock keyboard, glanced at the computer video display, but was not rewarded. He moved the bristle-probe from number to number. The display screen blinked, then showed a partial diagram of a circuit board.

The bristle that he had thrust inside the mechanism was actually the end filament of an optical laser, a more sophisticated cousin of the similar device which, in supermarket cash registers, read the bar codes on grocery items. The SLICKS was not programmed to read bar codes but to recognize circuitry patterns and render models of them on the display screen. The screen would register nothing whatsoever until the bristle-probe was aimed directly at a circuit or portion thereof, but then it would faithfully reproduce the hidden pattern that it saw.

Jack had to move the probe three times, insert it into the lock mechanism at three different points, before the computer was able to piece together a picture of the entire circuitry from partial views. The diagram glowed in bright green lines and symbols on the miniature video display. After three seconds of consideration, the computer drew boxes around
two small portions of the diagram to indicate those points at which a tap could easily be applied to the circuitry. Then it superimposed an image of the ten-digit keyboard over the diagram, to show where those two weak points were in relation to that portion of the lock mechanism that was visible to Jack.

“There’s a good tap-in spot below the number four button,” Jack said.

“You need me to drill?” Pollard asked.

“I don’t think so.”

Jack returned the optical probe to its slot and withdrew a third slender instrument with a spongy mesh tip of some material he could not identify, which the designer of SLICKS had labeled the “tap-wand.” He inserted it through the tiny gap in the lock mechanism at the base of the 4 button, slowly moved it up and down, left and right, until the computer beeped and flashed INTERVENTION on the miniature video display.

While Jack held the tap-wand in place and Chad Zepp held the SLICKS upright, Pollard used the computer’s small programming board to quickly type instructions. INTERVENTION disappeared, and onto the screen came other words: SYSTEM CONTROL ESTABLISHED. The computer could now feed commands directly to the microchip that processed the lock codes and that directed the sliding steel bolts to either close or open.

Pollard hit two more keys, and the SLICKS began to send sequences of three numbers to the microchip, one combination every six-hundredths of a second, all of which used the already known 4 as the middle digit of the code. SLICKS hit the right code—545—in only nine seconds.

With four simultaneous thumps, the lock bolts retracted as one.

Jack returned the tap-wand to its niche, switched off the computer. Only four minutes had passed since the rifle-shot that had blown out the truck’s right front tire.

Clockwork.

As Zepp slung the SLICKS over his shoulder again, Pollard opened the rear doors of the armored car. The money was theirs for the taking.

Zepp laughed with delight. With a gleeful whoop, Pollard clambered into the truck and began to push out bulging canvas bags.

But Jack still felt empty and cold inside.

A few snow flurries suddenly appeared in the wind.

The unexplained change in Jack, which had begun weeks ago, had now reached completion. He no longer cared about getting even with society. He felt purposeless, as adrift as the wind-borne flakes of snow.

Elko County, Nevada

Faye Block had turned on the
NO VACANCY
notice to ensure that they would not be disturbed.

Sitting around the table in the cheery kitchen of their apartment above the motel office, with the blinds shut against the night, the Blocks sipped coffee and listened spellbound as Dom told his story.

The only point at which they registered disbelief was when he told them of the impossible dance of paper moons in Zebediah Lomack’s house in Reno. But he was able to describe that startling event in such sharp detail that he felt gooseflesh pimpling his arms, and he saw that his own awe and fear were being transmitted to Faye and Ernie.