The Heist (18 page)

She stared at him. “Were you really a federal prosecutor?”

“For five years,” he said. “One of the best.”

“Then what happened? Did you sustain a serious head injury?”

His eyes narrowed. “Because I left the Justice Department to become a defense attorney?”

“Because you should know better than anyone that you can’t contact anybody.”

“It’s my life, my decision.”

“No, now it’s also
my
life. I will not let you put me, or my loved ones, in danger because of your arrogance and stupidity. If you use my cell phone to contact anyone, then ten minutes later the Viboras could know where we are or who I am. And then maybe the next thing that happens is they come here and kill us. Game over. Or maybe they show up at my sister’s house, shoot one of her kids to prove that they’re serious, and then use her as leverage to get me to give you up. And I will.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“In a nanosecond,” Kate said. “You either play by my rules, or you can walk out that door right now and take your own chances.”

“You threw away my shoes,” he said.

She tossed her car keys onto the kitchen table. “What’s your excuse now?”

He scowled at the keys and then at her. He wasn’t going anywhere. “This sucks. The least you could have done was put me up in a decent hotel.”

“Where the entire staff, probably half of them Mexican illegals with families living in Vibora-controlled territories, would know you were there and where we’d be putting every guest in the building at risk. Why would we do something as stupid as that?”

“We don’t even have a TV in here,” he said.

“Look at the bright side.” She gestured to the bookcase. “Now’s your chance to catch up on Nora Roberts.”

Neal Burnside found fresh sheets in the closet, made the bed, and crawled under the covers while Kate remained in the living room, wide awake and standing guard.

Coyotes were howling and owls were hooting in the darkness outside, and Burnside couldn’t sleep. The sounds made him think about all those cowboy movies he’d seen where the stupid settlers slept in their wagons and by their campfires, unaware that the howls and hoots were actually communications among the savage Indians, who were closing in on their camp to rape, torture, scalp, and kill them all.

Burnside had an irrational urge to open the bedroom door, run into the living room, and warn Kate that the Indians were about to attack. Okay, he knew that was crazy. He knew there were no Indians out there. But what if the Viboras were out there hooting and
howling, getting ready to attack? That wasn’t so crazy, right? Burnside gave his head a shake. Of course it was crazy. Why would the Viboras use coyote calls? Besides, nobody but Carl Jessup knew where he was. That was a calming thought. Except whoever Jessup assigned to relieve O’Hare also knew. And whoever that agent might have told, like a wife or girlfriend, and probably while their maid or gardener or pool man was within earshot, who are probably Mexican, and probably illegal, and who probably have a relative, friend, or neighbor with ties to the Viboras. No, no, no, he told himself. FBI agents are trained to be discreet. They wouldn’t talk in front of their gardener about a witness they were protecting. Reality check. Who notices the help? When was the last time he’d paid any attention to what he was saying on the phone while Emilia cleaned the house, Enrique cleaned the pool, and mow-blow-and-go Julio did his lawn?

What if there was a Hispanic custodian outside of Jessup’s office when he made the call? Or if there was a señorita watering the plants at the U.S. Marshals office when Jessup’s call came through?

He knew that the last U.S. Census had revealed that 48 percent of the population of Los Angeles County were Latinos, the majority of them from Mexico, and those were just the people the census takers were able to count. That figure didn’t include the roughly 2.6 million illegal immigrants that the Department of Homeland Security estimated were in California, most of them also from Mexico, so the actual percentage of Latinos in Los Angeles County could be much, much,
much
higher. And of those 2.6 million illegal aliens, how many had been smuggled from Mexico into California by someone with connections to the Viboras? And how many were from the vast areas of Mexico under Vibora control? And how many of them, or their relatives back home, were doing
business with the Viboras? Whatever that number was, it had to be astronomical. So Burnside came to the horrifying irrational conclusion that more than half the people in Los Angeles could be on the lookout for him.

My God, listen to yourself, he thought. That’s ridiculous. Half the population of Los Angeles isn’t after you. But he wasn’t listening to himself. He was listening to the Vibora assassins outside talking to one another in coyote and owl about attacking the cabin. Burnside gave a sigh of resignation and rolled out of bed. He needed to at least broach the subject of coyote communication with O’Hare. Get the whole insane idea out of his head and into hers so he could get some sleep.

He crossed the small room, cautioning himself not to go off babbling like some drooling moron, but to calmly suggest that she look into the possibility. Not that he actually believed there were Viboras out there, but to simply suggest she keep her ears attuned to the coyote nuances.

He opened his door, and at the same instant a hooded Vibora gunman kicked open the cabin’s front door and was immediately shot twice in the chest by O’Hare, who had leapt up from the couch and fired in one smooth motion.

“What?” Burnside said, not able to process what was happening, or determine if it was even real, since he knew it was insane to think the Viboras were there, and yet there was one riddled with bullets on the floor in front of him.

He saw a series of flashes in the darkness outside the open door, simultaneously heard a string of muffled pops, and O’Hare staggered forward, eyes wide in shock and fear. She fell face-first onto the couch, her gun slipping from her lifeless fingers onto the floor, and he saw four bullet holes in her back, oozing blood.

Burnside dove to the floor to retrieve O’Hare’s gun. He grabbed the gun and was rolling onto his side to shoot the first Vibora son of a bitch that came through the door when he felt the silencer against his forehead. He looked up into the cold eyes that peered through the slits of the black ski mask worn by the Vibora killer standing over him, and his heart did a painful contraction.

“I don’t know where Derek Griffin is,” Burnside said, struggling to breathe, dropping the gun. “He doesn’t have your money.”

A second gunman yanked Burnside to his feet, pulled the lawyer’s arms behind his back, bound his wrists together with duct tape, tore a strip off the roll and slapped it over his mouth, and put a black hood over his head. Burnside was pulled outside and forced to walk in his bare feet on the sharp stones and twigs until he came to an abrupt and painful stop when his shins hit what he suspected was the rear bumper of a car. The trunk was opened and he was shoved inside, unable to see or to use his hands to cushion his fall. His ankles were bound with the duct tape and the trunk slammed shut. A moment later the car sped away over the unpaved road, bumping and jostling Burnside so hard against the trunk lid and the floor that it felt like a beating. And as this nightmare was unfolding, there was just one thought he couldn’t get out of his head:

I can’t believe I was right
.

Nick, Chet, and Tom drove away from the safe house in a plain-wrap Camry with Willie at the wheel and Burnside in the trunk. Kate had chosen a Camry as their ride because it was the bestselling, most commonly seen car on the road, a staple of rental fleets, and therefore the hardest vehicle to single out and identify, not that there’d been any witnesses to the abduction.

Five minutes earlier, it was Chet who had been the first one through the cabin door, once again getting to play the dead Vibora, and it was Nick who’d held the gun on Burnside. Tom came in last to bind Burnside and put the hood over his head.

After the Camry disappeared down the road, Kate shucked her wet shirt and carefully peeled off the blood pack, which was basically a sheet of interlocking plastic bags that had been filled with red-dyed corn syrup and stuck to her back with heavy-duty bandage tape. On the surface of each blood bag were thin charges with tiny wires attached to them that led to a battery-operated
receiver hidden in her pocket. Nick used a remote control to set off the charges, which burst her blood packs and tore holes in her shirt at the same time he fired the blanks from his silenced gun.

Kate pulled a black Hefty trash bag from under the kitchen sink, dropped her soaked shirt and the blood pack into it, collected her gun and flashlight, and then, wearing only her bra and slacks, carried the bundle outside to her car, popped the trunk, and dropped everything inside. She took out the clean T-shirt that she’d stowed earlier in the trunk and pulled it over her head. She opened her gun locker, put the gun loaded with blanks inside, and took out an identical gun, this one loaded with live ammo, and stuck it into her belt-holster.

It wasn’t until she was sitting in the front seat of her car, key in hand and ready to go, that she allowed herself a whoop of victory and a smile. It always felt great when an op went as planned, and it didn’t matter if it was a legitimate sting or a scam, she realized. Success was sweet. Not that she would share this with Nick. She thought she might be screwed if Nick knew she was enjoying the con.

Burnside was
certain
that he was screwed. He’d been kidnapped by Vibora killers, thrown into the trunk of a car, and taken to God-knows-where to be tortured and killed. It was hard to be more screwed than that, unless you were dead. And the only reason he wasn’t dead was the Viboras’ belief that he knew where Derek Griffin was and, by extension, where they could get their money back and maybe all the rest of the plunder, too. That was half a billion dollars of leverage.

What Burnside had to figure out was a way to use that leverage to avoid torture, get himself out alive, and, as a bonus for his
creativity and cleverness, get some compensation for his pain and suffering. He was a smart man, and a lawyer, he told himself. His lifetime of experience arguing cases and bartering deals had to be useful for the life-or-death situation that he now faced. The key, despite all of the indignities he’d endured, was not to show weakness or fear.

The car stopped, he heard the trunk spring open, and he was jerked out and stood on his feet. His hood was snatched off and one of the masked men cut the tape on his ankles. Burnside wobbled a little before finding his balance. No one was saying anything. He squinted into the darkness and saw that they were parked beside a small private turbo jet that was perched in front of a rusted, dilapidated aircraft hangar in a remote corner of what he guessed was the Van Nuys Airport.

There were no major airlines flying out of Van Nuys. The airport was used for cargo jets and small chartered private and commercial aircraft. It was also a popular location for movie and television productions, which used the hangars as soundstages to house large interior sets and used everything else to re-create military bases or big international airports. It gave Burnside the strong but fleeting sensation that he was in a movie himself.

There were no people in sight besides the two Vibora gunmen. The other hangars nearby were closed and dark. The larger of the two gunmen walked ahead of Burnside into the plane, and the other, slimmer guy walked behind him, prodding him with the barrel of his gun to get moving.

Climbing into the plane with his hands bound behind his back wasn’t easy for Burnside, and he banged his head going through the low doorway into the cramped cabin. There were six seats in the plane, three on each side in a row against the bulkhead.

He was shoved into one of the middle seats, and the thin gunman ripped the tape from Burnside’s mouth. It felt like a knife cutting across his face and it brought tears to Burnside’s eyes. He half expected to see his lips stuck to the tape in the gunman’s hand. The tape binding his hands was slashed and bottles of water were passed around. One was dropped into Burnside’s lap.

Burnside chugged half a bottle and buckled his seat belt as the plane taxied along the tarmac to the runway. The plane paused for a long moment, the engines revved, and the plane moved forward, gaining speed. It rumbled and shook, and the Vibora sitting across the aisle from Burnside gripped his armrests hard. The plane lifted off, wobbled, bounced down, and lifted off a second time. The second liftoff was like a rocket launching, shoving Burnside back into his seat. He was glad it was dark out so he couldn’t see how close they might have come to shaving off the rooftops of the buildings adjacent to the airport.

The plane shook and rumbled some more. It dropped, lifted back up, and dropped again before finally leveling off. Burnside looked out the window at Los Angeles, spotted some landmarks, and realized they were heading south. It was a struggle to keep his eyes open, his brain fogged over, and his last thought before passing out was that he’d been drugged.