Against All Enemies (31 page)

“I don’t remember you being this twitchy before, Dig,” Rollins said.

“It’s Scorpion,” Jonathan corrected. Once an op went hot—once
any
op went hot—the use of real names was forbidden. Choosing from a list of three options Jonathan had offered, Jolaine had chosen She Devil. Rollins rejected Roleplay and settled for Madman. He certainly liked it better than Big Guy’s suggestion of Asshole as a moniker. “Everybody comm up.”

Jonathan saw to it that no corners were cut when it came to communications equipment. The ability to see and hear your enemy, in combination with the ability to see and hear your team, made all the difference between the success and failure.

Tonight, Jonathan, Boxers, and Jolaine wore custom-molded wireless transceivers that tucked snugly into their ear canals. When their satellite radios were set to VOX—voice-activated transmission—vibrations of the bones in their head brought the transmitter to life, and every word they said would be live, both between themselves and to the rest of the team, including Venice, who monitored everything from Fisherman’s Cove. When set on PTT—push to talk—a transmit button would have to be depressed in order to transmit a message.

As transient newcomers, Boomer and Madman would work Secret Service style, with a generic monitor in their ear and a microphone cord strung down their sleeve. VOX was still an option for them, but it was an awkward one. Jonathan monitored everyone’s progress. When they seemed set, he reached behind to depress the transmit button on his radio. “Mother Hen, Scorpion. Do a radio test for us, please.”

Five seconds later, Venice’s voice came clear as crystal through his earpiece. “Black Team, Mother Hen. Radio check. Respond when I call you. Madman.”

Rollins raised the wrist mike to his lips. “Madman’s okay.”

“Boomer.”

“Boomer’s okay.”

“White team. She Devil.”

Jolaine had positioned a transmit button in the center of her chest, beneath her camo shirt. She pressed it. “She Devil’s okay.”

“Words cannot express how much Mother Hen hates that handle,” Venice said. “Entry team. Big Guy.”

“Here.”

“And Scorpion.”

“Scorpion’s okay and we are set. Everyone keep the channel clear except for essential traffic. Mother Hen, do you have any eyes at all?”

“Nothing I like,” Venice said. “I’ve been able to tap into the ATM fisheye from the Commerce Bank, but it’s no one’s version of a clear picture.”

“Monitor what you’ve got and let me know if you see anything out of the ordinary.”

“Oh, you want me to
tell
you if I see something? I thought you wanted me just to keep that a secret.”

Rollins laughed. “I’m liking her more and more,” he said off the air.

“Yeah, give it a couple of years.”

“Big Guy, do you have traffic?” Venice asked. “Give what a couple of years?”

“Shit!” he spat. He damn near turned himself inside out switching off VOX. Then he pressed his transmit button. “Disregard, Mother Hen.”

“We’d all be wise to consider that a lesson learned,” Jonathan said through a chuckle. “Nobody on VOX unless I order it.”

“Oo-uh,” Dylan said.

“And we don’t oo-uh here,” Jonathan said. “We’re all civilians now.”

“Not all of us,” Rollins said.

“The night is young, Stanley,” Boxers said. Then, to get ahead of Jonathan, “I mean Madman. This might not turn out to be your best career move.”

“Focus, gentlemen,” Jonathan said. He loved the banter as much as the next guy, but he had his limits. “Boomer and Madman. Questions?”

They both shook their heads.

“I prefer verbal,” Jonathan said.

“No questions.” That came in unison.

“Okay, then. Git. Let us know when the alarms are disabled.” The plan was simple and direct—and again, untraceable if they went about it correctly. Madman would keep an eye out while Boomer disconnected the phone line—it was merely a matter of dislodging a plug that could easily be reset—and then disconnecting the exterior to the local alarm by unscrewing the connectors. Whoever had put this system in place had not planned for a sophisticated burglar.

Jonathan checked his watch as they left through the back door of Mary’s. It shouldn’t take more than five minutes, he figured. In fact, it took just under four. His earbud popped. “Exterior’s clear.”

Now it was Jonathan’s turn. If big steaming holes had been an acceptable side effect of entering the hardware store, then popping the door would have been Boxers’ job. As it was, Jonathan had decided on the more subtle approach of lock picks, and as with all things more subtle than not, that fell more naturally into his wheelhouse.

“You wait here with She Devil,” he said to Big Guy, “until I get the lock undone.”

“Shouldn’t I be watching your back?” Boxers asked. He didn’t like it when Jonathan worked without backup.

“It’ll only take a few minutes,” Jonathan said. “It’s going to be obvious enough if someone drives by and sees me working the door. With both of us, it’d be too much.” He wasn’t going to argue the point, so he walked back outside as he was talking.

Over the years of doing this kind of work, he’d learned that one of the hardest things to do was to look intentionally nonchalant. When you genuinely had nothing to be concerned about, it was easy to stay unnoticed, in large measure because you didn’t care if you
were
noticed. It’s when people try to be invisible that they stand out like a bright light on a dark night. Jonathan believed that people generated a different kind of energy when they felt nervous, and that it was that energy that triggered discomfort in others.

Think about it. You can pass a thousand people in a shopping mall without noticing any of them, yet there’ll be that
one guy
that gives you the creeps. It’s not anything he’s said or anything he’s done, it’s just a
feeling.
Countless studies had shown that those discomfiting feelings—those feelings of “stranger danger”—were real and needed to be paid attention to.

In Jonathan’s line of work, the challenge lay in not giving out the vibes for others to intercept. He thought of that kind of thing as the woo-woo element of his job, and he believed that it was impossible to teach it to others. The woo-woo elements led inevitably to platitudes that resonated as hollow and empty to those who didn’t believe in them. If you projected confidence, people felt confident in you, and their belief resulted in results worthy of the confidence. It was a big cycle. To project victory guaranteed victory. To consider failure to be an option guaranteed failure as the only outcome.

Or something like that.

As Jonathan stepped out from behind Mary’s Diner, dressed in camouflage with a pistol concealed on his hip and a leather pouch of lock picks in his hand, he pretended that he belonged, and believed that no one who saw him would think otherwise.

Assuming that Bud hadn’t invested more in his cylinder lock than he had in his burglar alarm, Jonathan anticipated no problem getting through the door.

Coal River Road was empty from horizon to horizon as Jonathan stepped from the street up to the sidewalk. He opened the flap on the pouch, and his fingers worked by feel to find the two tools that he would need—the tension bar and the rake. By the time he reached the door, his hands were ready to go. It was darker than he’d like, but this was an operation that shouldn’t take a lot of visual examination. And night vision was out of the question because of the bizarre space-man look that it presented to observers.

Simple locks like standard cylinder locks found on glass doors that were typical of retail establishments posed little challenge to anyone with even a vague knowledge of what they were doing. These were pin-tumbler locks. The keyway slit at the front of the lock formed the center of a rotating cylinder which, when rotated, caused the bolt to either insert or retract itself from the receiving slot in the door jamb. Two lines of pins—one on the top and one on the bottom—jutted into the keyway like tiny stalactites and stalagmites and their presence physically blocked the cylinder from turning. The ridges on the key pushed these pins out of the way, removing the blockage and allowing the lock to turn.

The process of picking a lock required the burglar to push the pin tumblers out of the way manually. To do this, Jonathan would insert a tension bar into the lock to put rotational torque on the cylinder, and then use a pick to physically push the pin tumblers out of the way. As they cleared their individual slots, the cylinder would turn a tiny fraction, just enough to keep the pins from reinserting themselves.

Some burglars worked well with a tension bar that was essentially an L-shaped piece of metal that they’d stick into the keyway to add torque to the cylinder. Jonathan preferred a Y-shaped tension bar that never entered the keyway, but rather grasped the slit on the top and the bottom. He held it in place with his left thumb and applied upward pressure with the first knuckle of his forefinger. With the tension applied, he inserted the rake—a general purpose thin metal pick with a squiggly head—into the keyway and literally raked it along the heads of the pins, first along the top and then along the bottom. With each pass, the cylinder turned a little, and after maybe seven seconds, the pressure released, and the cylinder turned all the way.

Jonathan returned the picks to his pocket and keyed his mike. “We’re in,” he said.

Two seconds later, Boxers’ hulking form emerged from the shadow of Mary’s Diner, and he walked a straight line across the street to join Jonathan on the sidewalk in front of the door. Jonathan smiled as his big friend approached. He was one of those people who attracted attention no matter what. Big Guy was still five feet away and moving when Jonathan pulled the door open and stepped inside. Boxers was with him ten seconds later.

Jonathan spun the cylinder again to lock them in. “NVGs,” he said. In unison, the two burglars dropped to a knee, shrugged out of their day packs, and removed a four-tube night vision goggles array. They slipped them over their heads and as Jonathan flipped the switch, the darkness became green-tinted daytime.

“Money order records and security camera recordings,” Jonathan said, reminding them both of the limits of their mission. “Other than those missing things, no sign that we were ever here.”

“You know I was listening last time you said that, right?” Boxers said.

Jonathan ignored him. More out of habit than necessity, he drew his .45, and led with it as he advanced into the empty shop. Yes, it was overkill, but he could never remember a single time in his many-year career when he’d said, “Dammit, I wish I hadn’t drawn my weapon.” The converse, however . . .

The entire room became brighter as Boxers turned on an infrared flashlight and scanned the room with the beam, which would appear as invisible to anyone who was not equipped with night vision. The effect was to add less-green light to an otherwise green environment.

They moved deeper into the store. The plan was for Boxers to search the area around the cash register and the gun display while Jonathan tossed the office in the back. Jonathan assumed that Bud had no reason to hide the materials they were looking for, so the whole mission couldn’t take more than—

“Freeze,” Boxers said in a tone that Jonathan had heard too many times over the years.

Once heard, it meant exactly what it stated. Freeze. As in, stop whatever you were doing in exactly the posture you were holding, and lock every muscle. That’s what Jonathan did. “What?”

“Look down at your feet,” Big Guy said. “Three feet ahead and at shin level.”

Boxers had illuminated the area with the beam of his IR flashlight, and Jonathan actually saw the shadow of the trip wire before he found the trip wire itself. He was still a step and a half away, but trip wires were always concerning. “What does it go to?” he asked.

“Interesting question,” Boxers said. “I’ll get back to you on that.”

Frozen as he was, with the majority of his weight on his left foot, Jonathan felt particularly unbalanced as he watched Boxers’ light sweep the room.

“I’m almost positive you can redistribute your weight,” Big Guy said.

“Almost positive.”

“Sixty percent, easy.” Boxers rumbled out a laugh. “But let me hide behind this shelf before you do it.”

“I hate you,” Jonathan said. He understood Boxers-speak, though. All of that tranlated to
you’re safe where you stand, but go no farther.

A trip wire meant a booby trap, and the presence of a booby trap fundamentally changed the nature of the game. Bud was prepared to kill to protect that which he valued, and people who were willing to set one trap were more often than not willing to set several. The evening just got longer.

“Found it,” Boxers said. “It’s a good old-fashioned shotgun trap. When was the last time you saw one of those?” To put tension on the trip wire was to pull the trigger on a shotgun. Nothing good came from that.

Jonathan watched as the tension drooped out of the trip wire. He knew that Boxers had moved the gun and eliminated the threat. “Pretty aggressive move,” Jonathan said. “In my part of the world, that would get you sent away for life.”

“I believe you could say that the same would be true for the intruder,” Boxers replied. Jonathan could see his smile even in the night vision. “He must have some pretty cool shit to hide. We’re clear.”

Clear but on notice.

They got to the sales counter first. “This is mine,” Boxers said.

“I’ve got the office.”

“Entry team, what is your sitrep?” Per the plan, Venice had called in for a situation report.

“We’re inside and on schedule,” Jonathan said. She didn’t have to know about the booby trap.

Even with night vision, the view inside the back office was dim. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see as much as it was he couldn’t make out the fine detail. Reading, for example, was difficult. Jonathan withdrew his own IR penlight from its pocket on his sleeve, and he pressed the button to bring it to life. That made all the difference in the world.

Bud’s office looked exactly like what you would think something called “Bud’s office” would look like. Maybe ten by ten, the place looked like it had been hit by a cyclone. Papers lay upon papers, which had been stacked upon food wrappers placed upon papers. The desk itself was of hearty wooden construction—the kind of desk that hadn’t been made in seventy years. Bud had cleared out a one-foot-by-one-foot rectangle of space on the desk, directly in front of the old wooden desk chair. Jonathan figured that was the space he allowed himself for actually doing work.