Ghostman (10 page)

I looked up at the surveillance cameras. They were several generations out of date. I’d seen pictures from cameras of that era. The license plates would have looked like a Rorschach blot. When I checked on the
plane, there was nothing on the news about the cops catching the guy. Maybe his getaway car was still missing too. If that was so, he must have planned his getaway just as well as Ribbons and Moreno had. Maybe even better. After all, the sniper didn’t have his face all over the news.

I closed my eyes and put myself inside his head. I became him for a moment and lived through his senses. I felt the rush and the weight of the rifle against my shoulder. I imagined trying to hold my racing breath as I centered the crosshairs on the back of Moreno’s head. I imagined counting my heartbeats and correcting for the ocean wind. I imagined waiting for exactly the right moment, for Ribbons to cross the concrete barrier back into the parking garage. I imagined squeezing the trigger, feeling the force of the recoil absorbing into my shoulder and seeing the puff of pink mist as Moreno’s body crumpled on the steering wheel. I imagined what I must’ve been thinking at that exact moment.

There was only one thing on my mind.

Kill
.

I stood there a moment longer, then opened my eyes and blinked. When I came out of it, I headed toward the Boardwalk, slipping quickly under the yellow tape, past the cop, into the pedestrian traffic. A man in torn denim shorts blew past me on a rickshaw. For ten bucks, he was a slow, expensive taxi. Not for me. I weaved through the crowd, blending into the sea of bright summer colors. I became invisible. I caught my first sight of the ocean. It churned like a giant black oil slick up against the sand dunes.

When I got back to my rental, I switched on the GPS. It found my current location. I took a long look at the map and moved it around using the arrow buttons. The area looked like a getaway nightmare. One side of the Regency faced the ocean, two others faced more casinos and the fourth emptied to a major arterial road that in turn went to a patrolled highway with a toll booth every few miles.

I memorized the map as I scrolled. I’m no wheelman. I can drive
well, if it really comes down to it, but actually planning a getaway route was never among my talents. There was a whole lot of information that the wheelman planning the heist would’ve known but I didn’t have time to figure out. I kept thinking about the clue Marcus had given me. A derelict airport. I’d flown into Atlantic City International, nearly twenty miles away through the salt marshes. There were a few unused airstrips out there, sure, but they were about a hundred times farther away than any reasonable wheelman could accept, especially in the first getaway car. If this was a two-car getaway, I was looking for something within ten blocks, like Marcus said. I scrolled for a few more seconds, putting all my attention into the map.

I read somewhere that there’s no such thing as eidetic memory. Nobody remembers everything perfectly, and the people who claim to are liars. I believe it, but even normal people can remember more than they think. Greek poets used to memorize epic poems hundreds of pages long, and they weren’t anything special. They did it much like I memorize maps. They did it the same way Angela taught me to memorize things. Slowly, and with a lot of practice.

I saw all the possible routes expand out in my mind, spreading like the branches of a tree.

I found something that looked promising about ten blocks away. It was a route that ran parallel to the beach for a few blocks before turning off into one of the city’s poorer neighborhoods. The ending spot looked like a large empty blank spot on the map. There was a listing there for a baseball field, but nothing else. I stared at it, taking my time, and finally could make out where the control tower used to be, and the runways, and the parking lot. It
had
been an airfield once. Now it was just a dead zone of abandoned buildings, not ten blocks from downtown.

I traced the route. Went over all the directions in my head. It was less than a five-minute drive. Three minutes, if there wasn’t any traffic. Two, if you were driving like the devil was on your tail. Maybe the third shooter did give chase, and caught up even before Ribbons got there.

And I’d be in for a very bloody surprise.

13

KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA

Our plane landed at five in the evening and the city was cooking. I remember the night clearly. It was winter down there and the sun was hanging on the edge of the horizon, dipping over the ocean and casting the whole city in light the color of blood. We’d followed the sun for most of the thirty-hour flight. I’d watched it through the airplane window over the wing.

Marcus had given us all new passports. Mine was from the United States and had the name
Jack Delton
in it. It didn’t look like a fake, either. Even the special laminate felt real when I rubbed it. It would serve as my primary form of identification while I was in the country. Of course I’d also brought a second passport just in case, but that was for emergencies only.

We were all ushered through Immigration with no fanfare. Outside, a white limo was waiting for us. Marcus had arranged everything in advance, which was good. I didn’t speak a single word of Malay and didn’t have a dime of local currency. I was relying on him completely.

I had no idea how much trouble that would get me.

Malaysia was like no place I’d ever seen before. As we rode to the hotel, I leaned against the limousine door and watched the streets go by. The city was full of wealth and culture, but all of that wealth and culture was scattered around in a way that seemed haphazard to me. The financial district had skyscrapers the size of mountains next to great open spaces with nothing in them at all but dust and crab bushes. The parks had fountains lit up like Las Vegas, but the edges of the city were as poor as the slums of São Paulo. The Petronas Towers dominated the view constantly. They were lit up with spotlights that reflected off the clouds. It was their symbol, I guess. Their Empire State Building and their Golden Gate Bridge and their Hollywood sign all rolled up into one. Everywhere I looked, there they were, glowing in the distance.

By the time we got to the hotel, I was exhausted. It was a nine-hour time difference from L.A. and I hadn’t slept a wink on the whole thirty-hour flight. Our suite at the Mandarin Oriental was the size of a small house. I walked in the door and took off my shoes in almost the same motion. There was a basket of fruit on the counter with a personalized welcome card on top, but all I could think about was coffee. I went directly to the small kitchen to look for a drip machine while the rest of the group went into the dining area and started pouring drinks from the bar. I looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the glowing super-skyscraper across from us. It was past dark by then and the lights were coming up like distant fireworks.

I’d located the machine and just put the coffee grounds into the basket when I heard Angela walk up behind me. I froze at the sound of her heels on the carpet. They reminded me of when we’d first met.

When Angela took me under her wing, I was twenty-three years old. I wasn’t a very careful person. In fact, I wasn’t very much of a person at all. I was just a kid from Las Vegas who didn’t want to deal with society anymore. I didn’t have any particular personality or talent. I’d spent a couple of years at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, but I never made any friends. Outside of my course work, I didn’t have any ambitions. No drive. When I met her, I was dreaming up bank robberies on
park benches and sleeping in the back of my car. I made a lot of amateur mistakes. Angela trained all that out of me. She taught me how to be careful, how to cut off my last ties with the normal world and how to live like a ghost. One night, she heated up a frying pan on the stove until it glowed orange, then told me to put my belt strap in my mouth and bite down on the leather. With her help, I pressed my fingertips against the searing metal one by one, over and over, until the scar tissue formed and the wrinkles never grew back.

“You’re making coffee at this hour?” she said.

“I can’t sleep.” I said.

“Two sugars for me, then.”

She sat down on the couch opposite the kitchenette. I could feel her looking at me, even with my head turned. I poured excess water out of the flask. I filled the machine with water and pressed the button. The machine boiled and dripped. She sat there in silence as I watched the coffee brew until the light went off. I opened two sugar packets for her and then poured hot coffee into two ceramic cups. I stirred hers gently with the handle of the spoon.

“You’ve been quiet,” she said.

“I’ve never been to this city before.”

“No,” she said. “It’s more than that.”

I handed her the cup and sat next to her in a chair in front of the desk by the window. I watched her swirl the coffee and look into it like she was reading tea leaves.

“How much do you know about Marcus?” she said.

“I know his jobs are huge. I know everybody comes away from them rich.”

“But do you know anything about him? Anything at all?”

“I don’t,” I said. “But I barely know anything about you, and I’ve known you for almost eight years now. Do you know something I don’t?”

“I know he’s very intelligent,” she said.

I nodded. “He seems to have everything figured out. I like that. He looks like he knows what he’s doing.”

“But you don’t
know
if he knows what he’s doing.”

“You’re right, I don’t.”

She pursed her lips and put her coffee down on the study desk next to us. She crossed her legs and bit her lip as she considered something in her head. She took her time before she said it, like she wasn’t completely sure what to say, or how to say it.

“I told him about you,” she said after a moment.

I didn’t say anything.

“He said he wanted options, so I gave him your blind e-mail. I thought you wouldn’t come. I thought you wouldn’t even consider it. The way you pick jobs isn’t normal. I’ve seen you pass up jobs that another man would’ve waited his whole career for. I thought he’d send you a message and you wouldn’t even
respond
. You’d be off in the Mediterranean somewhere, reading one of your books, waiting for something more interesting to come along. Sketching old Roman wall paintings or something.”

“I’m here,” I said.

“You are,” she said. “And I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

I looked down at my coffee and didn’t say anything. Angela dug her feet into the carpet like she was thinking something over that was too big to put into words. We were quiet for a moment. She was lost somewhere in her thoughts.

Then she said, “I want you to draw me a dollar bill.”

“What?”

“I mean right now, draw me the best American one-dollar bill you can.”

“Is this a hypothetical thing, or do you actually want me to do it?”

“No. I really want you to do it. You probably see a dollar bill dozens of times every day. You’ve probably spent more time looking at the dollar bill than you’ve spent looking at your own toes. It doesn’t have to be perfect. I just want you to draw me one.”

“What for?”

“Consider it part of your education.”

“I’m really no good at forgery.”

“I didn’t ask you to
copy
a dollar bill, I asked you to draw me one.”

“What’s the difference?”

“This is about the dollar bill in your head,” she said. “Not the one right in front of you. Think of it as an exercise in perception. I want to see what you remember, not what you see. I can look at a map and memorize it in an instant. That isn’t just something I was born with. I taught myself to do that. I studied mazes until I could copy them after just a glance. It sounds easy, but it isn’t. I want to see you do the same thing, starting with the front of a dollar bill. Look, I even have a pen in the proper color.”

She opened her purse and took out a green fine-point, felt-tip pen. She put it on the desk next to the pad of hotel stationery. I stared at her. She stared right back at me.

“Okay,” I said.

I picked up the pen and started with a rectangle, roughly two and a half times longer than it was wide. At first I thought it would be easy. Who doesn’t know what a dollar bill looks like? But as I tried to put it all together in my head, it started falling apart. There were a lot of details. I could remember the general layout. I put the number one in all four corners. I remembered that the top left number was surrounded by a floral design, so I circled it. I remembered that the number at the top right was surrounded by a shieldlike thing, so I added something like that. I put an oval in the center and drew Washington’s portrait pretty simply, then put the words
The United States of America
above it. Under the portrait I wrote
One Dollar
. I turned the piece of paper around and showed it to her.

“No,” she said. “Try it again.”

I took another look to evaluate what I’d done wrong, then ripped off a new page.

I started with the same rectangle, because I knew I’d got that more or less right. I put the numerals in all four corners and put a circle
around the top left and a box around the top right. I put the oval with the portrait in the right place, and
The United States of America
and
One Dollar
too. This time I remembered that up at the very top of the bill were the words
Federal Reserve Note
, so I put those in, and I remembered that there were official seals on either side so I drew circles to the left and right of the portrait. I put a row of random numbers under the word
America
, and the words
This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private
under the word
United
. I drew a little squiggly line under each seal where the signatures were supposed to be.

She stopped me before I could finish. “No, that’s not it, either.”

I crumpled up the sheet and started a third one.