Ghostman (24 page)

I was looking for the Wolf’s men.

It was only a matter of time before they found me again. The Wolf
wasn’t stupid. Even an idiot would’ve figured out what had happened to Aleksei and Martin by now and sent a crew out to get me. I took a look around to make sure there wasn’t anyone within earshot. The Boardwalk was full of sounds that would drown out aural surveillance. Pedicabs clacked on wooden boards. Amusement rides wailed with sirens. Storefronts blasted their radios out the front door at maximum volume.

I flipped open a new phone and dialed Alexander Lakes. He answered on the first ring.

“I got you access,” he said, in lieu of a greeting.

“Yeah?”

“I have a phone number that will put you in contact with someone in the police department. Dirty as hell, cautious as can be. This guy likes to meet on his own terms. He’s just as careful as you.”

“Does this contact have a name?”

“No.”

“Not even an alias?”

“You sound surprised. Half the people I work with don’t use their real names, including you. This one just doesn’t use a fake—he uses no name at all. The way he works, he doesn’t need an alias. He’s too quick and clean for all that.”

“How do you know he’s a cop, then? How do you know he really has the access to the things he claims to?”

“He’s come through before. You’ve got to trust him.”

“I’ve never been one for trust. How does he get paid?”

“I dead-dropped the money for him half an hour ago. He’ll pick it up when he feels ready.”

I looked at my watch. I must have taken a longer breakfast than I thought, because it was almost 7 a.m. already. Definitely late enough to call a cop on the day shift. I said, “So how does he want to do this?”

“You’re going to call a number. He’ll let it go to voice mail. Once he’s checked you out, he’ll send you a text message. The text message will give you another number to call, which will hook you up to his
phone-over-Internet protocol. Very difficult to trace. He’ll give you what you want right there, right then. You’ll speak only on the phone. Don’t ask about meeting him. For this amount of money, he’ll give you about five minutes. After five minutes he’ll hang up, whether you’re done or not.”

“He’s careful.”

“He’s a dirty cop. He knows all the ways he can get caught.”

Lakes gave me the number. I memorized it and said it back to him as I pulled a twenty out of my wallet and left it on the table. “Is this guy going to be ready to do business?” I said. “This guy is no use to me asleep.”

“He’s awake. He’s always awake. This guy’s the hardest-working dirty cop I’d ever seen.”

“Let’s hope he never goes clean on us.”

“I got you a Honda Accord,” Lakes said.

“What color?”

“Red.”

“Red’s hardly low-profile.”

“Compared to the custom midnight-black paint and detail on the hundred-thousand-dollar sports coupe you’re flying around in now, this is a goddamn invisibility cloak.”

“At what point did you stop calling me ‘sir’?”

“About the time you stole my car.”

I went back to where I parked the Bentley and took out a different cell phone without hanging up on Lakes. I pounded in the number Lakes had given me. It rang as I walked. The voice-mail message wasn’t personalized—just a generic prerecorded voice that said I should leave a message at the beep. I ended the call before the recording started. I put the other phone up to my ear and said to Lakes, “I rang your guy. How long am I going to have to wait for his text?”

“It shouldn’t be long. He’s got to get to a computer.”

“Right.”

“Meet me at the diner. We’ll swap cars again.”

“I might be a while,” I said. “I’ve got to go check out an apartment in the projects.”

“Don’t let anybody steal my car.”

I hung up.

Two seconds later, my second phone beeped and I flipped it open. The sender’s number was restricted, and the message was eight capital letters with two dashes between them. I pressed the numbers that corresponded to the letters on the T9 pad, putting in zeroes for the dashes. The phone rang twice before it picked up.

“Hello?” The voice was deep, slow, booming and robotic. He was using a voice changer.

“I hear you have access to information,” I said.

“This is correct.”

“I’m looking into the theft of a Mazda Miata in Atlantic City. Unresolved case, reported missing sometime in the last two weeks.”

There was silence for a bit, almost as if the line had gone dead, but it hadn’t. This was a product of the voice changer, I think. A voice changer shifts the tone of human-range sounds down by several octaves. Cheap ones also augment background noises, leading to indecipherable, alien-sounding static on the other end. Expensive voice changers, like this one, edit that out entirely and transmit dead silence.

The voice on the other end said, “There are two hits.”

“Tell me.”

“A green 2009 Miata was reported stolen from Margate eight days ago and a white ’92 Miata yesterday from the Borgata downtown.”

The second car wasn’t right. It was too old to match the tire tracks out at the airfield, and the date was wrong.

“Tell me about the first one,” I said.

“Mazda Miata, 2009, hunter green, New Jersey license plate Xray-Zulu-Victor-nine-three-Hotel. Reported missing from a parking space near Jerome Avenue Park eight days ago at eleven hundred hours. Last seen the previous night around midnight.”

“Okay,” I said. “Can you delete the report?”

“Done. The hard copy is still in the records, however, if they ever go looking. Anything else?”

“Yeah, one more thing.”

“Shoot.”

“Can you give me the name of the guy who filed that report?”

“Oh, yeah,” the voice said. “A guy named Harry Turner.”

36

Shit.

Moreno and Ribbons had stolen one of the Wolf’s cars and used it for the heist. Why the hell would they do that? It made no sense to me. My mind raced for explanations, but nothing I could come up with worked. Were Moreno and Ribbons trying to throw off the police or something? If they were, it was a downright stupid plan. Did Marcus order them to do it? I don’t think so. It wouldn’t accomplish anything except pissing the Wolf off even further.

Huh.

I drove around aimlessly for a while to clear my head before starting off in the direction of Ribbons’s scatter. I chewed over the new information like it was a piece of gristle. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

I was lost in thought when I caught sight of a white Mercedes in my rearview mirror. The windows were tinted, but through the hot sunlight I could make out the faint silhouette of a single driver who kept his head abnormally low near the dash, and his hands at eleven and three on the wheel. I couldn’t make out his face, but then again I didn’t have to. I knew he was one of the Wolf’s men.

That happened fast. I didn’t expect the Wolf to find me for another
two hours. In a way, though, I was glad that his men had caught up with me again. As long as he kept sending people after me, I knew I was doing something right.

I let the man follow me two cars back from one end of the city to the other. I went south. He went south. I turned left. He turned left. I made it easy for him. I drove slowly and signaled all of my turns. Once I reached the edge of the city I continued along the coast, turning down a thin two-lane road that wound through uninhabitable marshland punctuated with thin intercoastal waterways. Even though there were few other cars on the road, the white Mercedes still chose to follow me. After a few minutes we were in the middle of nowhere and the rest of the traffic had disappeared. It was just me and him. We were maybe five hundred feet apart now with nothing but the ocean beside us. I made it easy for him to see me and follow. I didn’t want to shake this tail. No.

I wanted to ask a few questions.

Of course this would’ve been a lot easier if I still had a gun, and even easier if it weren’t broad daylight and anybody out for a leisurely drive could see us. There were no other cars on this stretch of road, but at this time of day somebody could drive by at any minute. This was a problem. I had a plan, and that plan had certain requirements. If the plan went wrong, the last thing I wanted was for some good Samaritan to call 911 on me and for this whole deal to end with a police chase. Hell, even if the plan went perfectly, the trick I had in mind was pretty dangerous. I didn’t want anybody to get hurt. At least, nobody who didn’t have to.

I looked at my watch. Quarter to 8 a.m. Good god. We’d been at this for almost an hour.

I took my foot off the gas and let myself coast gently.

The trick I had in mind was simple. Now that we were the only two cars on the road, if I were to suddenly come to a stop, say, because of an engine failure, the driver in the white Mercedes would have to make a choice. He would either have to keep going and drive past me, which would mean leaving me behind and possibly losing me, or stopping also, which would mean, out here in the middle of nowhere, that we’d have
an encounter. One way or another, I was going to have a conversation with the driver of that car.

I let myself drift along for a good minute or so. The road was smooth and flat. Once I was under ten miles per hour, though, I flicked the hazards on and pulled directly into the center of the road. I tapped the brake and came to a full stop. The engine ticked and cooled.

I kept my eyes on the car behind me. The Mercedes faltered as it came around the bend and into full view. That was the moment of truth—the driver was making his choice to speed up or slow down. The Mercedes closed the distance between us and I watched it grow bigger in the mirrors. He definitely wasn’t going to stop. He swerved far out into the right lane to give me some room, but instead of slowing down he was speeding up. Once he was even with me, he honked his horn as if to say,
Screw you, buddy
.

Then I stomped on the gas.

A Bentley Continental has 560 metric horsepower, a twin turbo-charged engine and a top speed around two hundred miles an hour. Needless to say, when I hit the gas, the car took off. I jacked the wheel as if I was going to ram him. The driver panicked. He jerked left to avoid getting hit and instead slammed into the left-lane guardrail facing the ocean. His car tottered on two wheels for a second before the metal finally gave out and the Mercedes careened off the edge. It flipped over once and splashed down into the surf.

I pulled to a stop at the side of the road and got out.

37

KUALA LUMPUR

The first few days after I killed Harrison were tough. Killing a cop is one of the worst things that can happen during a heist. Law enforcement has a knack for bringing cop killers to justice. They spare no expense. Homicides have high clearance rates, and homicides involving the police are even better. Those murders get solved. Period. Every criminal with half a brain knows this.

Of course, we didn’t know for sure the guy I killed was a proper cop. Harrison was a white guy, which means he was less likely to be undercover for the Malaysian Royal Police, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t undercover for somebody or other. He could’ve been an Interpol agent, or paid informant, or even an FBI attaché. If he were any of those, we could be in just as much trouble. As soon as a body with a badge hits the dirt, the only smart thing to do is run and hide for as long as it takes.

So that’s exactly what we did.

We ran.

The whole crew went radio silent less than four hours after the shooting. We were each allowed to keep one phone on in case Marcus
called, but we couldn’t contact anyone else for any reason. There was a protocol we’d all agreed to follow in case something like this happened. We’d lie low in the city for six days. If Marcus contacted us about resuming the job, we’d do it. If Marcus didn’t contact us, however, we’d call the job a wash and get out of the country. For those six days, though, we needed to be completely off grid. We’d leave our scatters only for food and water, nothing else. No phone calls, no Internet, no shopping, no conversations. We’d talk to no one, write to no one and leave no trace of our existence. If you forgot to bring a razor into the scatter with you, you weren’t going to shave. We gathered in the Mandarin Oriental for the last time the afternoon right after the shooting. Even though it was daytime, it was raining by then and it felt like night. Alton Hill sat on a couch in the corner, filling his getaway backpack up with stacks of fifty-dollar bills. The rest of us stood around the video-conferencing table and discussed what we would do. There were a lot of sympathetic nods as I described the events out in the Highlands. We generally agreed that I had done the right thing, if a little rashly, so we’d keep an open mind about keeping to the plan. In six days we’d either be back to work planning this heist or halfway across the globe on separate jets, never to see one another again.

When the meeting was over, it took me less than thirty seconds to collect my things and get out of the hotel. My gun was under the pillow and my bag was packed by the door. I slung the duffel over my shoulder and walked out without a second glance. Angela took the same elevator with me, and we watched as the floor numbers steadily counted down. I was nervous because we hadn’t been able to get in touch with Marcus. I couldn’t stop thinking about that story with the jar of nutmeg. Angela touched my hand. We looked at each other. Once the elevator reached the bottom we’d be strangers again, but for a moment we were simply ourselves. She smiled at me and said, “Does this bank job really mean that much to you?”

“It means everything,” I said.

“Then I’m with you,” she said. “I have your back, no matter what.”

We didn’t have to say anything after that. The silence was all we needed. When we reached the lobby, the door chimed and opened.

I went to my scatter the long way, by cab down Jalan Ampang all the way downtown to where it merges into Jalan Gereja. My room was in a small place behind a laundry with a hand-painted sign. When I got there I put my bag next to the door and my gun under my pillow, then sat at the edge of the bed and stared at the wall for what felt like an hour. I watched the sunlight drain away along it until the room was dark. I listened to water gather along the ridge of the showerhead until it formed a large drop and fell. My scatter was empty and plain and cheap and poor. It was everything I wanted and nothing I didn’t. I closed my eyes and let myself sleep.