Ghostman (6 page)

And then there was us.

There isn’t a proper name for what we do, but we used to call ourselves
ghostmen
. Angela and I were in the business of disappearing. I’ve helped maybe a hundred bank robbers escape over the years. Not all of it is disguises and fake passports and driver’s licenses and stolen birth certificates, either. Most of it is confidence. A ghostman has to be confident in the way he acts, talks and behaves. You could be on the FBI’s top-ten list with your picture up in every post office from Bangor to South Beach, but if you know how to act like somebody else and you have the
chops to prove it, you could live on Park Avenue and nobody would ever notice. People see what you tell them to see.

Angela and I were professional impostors.

She got her start as an actress in Los Angeles. She was very good at it, like you’d expect, but that didn’t translate into success on the screen. Her acting was pathological. She was pure Method. She didn’t act, she changed who she was. Casting directors hated her for it. A man might pull off spending his whole life in character, but not a beautiful young woman. She was a different person for every person she met. She’d get cast as a trophy wife and show up as a little girl. Her first measure of success was as a corporate spy. She bluffed her way into an executive-assistant position for a major aeronautics company. Got paid a hundred grand to steal a blueprint for a military jet and deliver it to the next company over. I don’t think she did anything else but steal after that. She made enough money to eventually begin creating her own personal roles. She’d wake up each morning and choose who she wanted to be that day. When she found me, she was posing as an FBI agent so she could rob a cartel of counterfeiters. She tricked me into helping her, and I was hooked.

From that day on, I was her apprentice.

These days, I’m the best in the business. I can hit a bank and disappear in two days, and nobody would ever know I was even there. I could talk my way into Congress, if I wanted to. But as good a liar and a thief as I am, I could never hold a candle to Angela. She taught me everything I knew. I watched her flick her cigarette butt and stomp it into the soft, moist earth. I drank a bourbon and listened to the sound of her voice in my ear.

When the meeting was over, Angela took me by the arm and led me off into the forest behind the last cabin. We walked and we walked and we walked until my pupils were like dinner plates. It was as dark as the inside of an eyelid back there. The only light was from the moon behind the clouds. After maybe half a mile, she stopped and turned and stared
right at me like she had something to say. She didn’t speak for a long time, but when she did, she spoke in her real voice. She spoke in the voice that she only ever used with me.

“What are you doing here?” She looked up and shook her head. “What did he do to get you here?”

“Nothing. He gave me a location, that’s all.”

“I thought I taught you never to go on a job without all the information up front. I thought I taught you never to trust a stranger, especially if that stranger’s planning a job. I thought I taught you to be careful.”

“You did teach me that.”

“Then what the hell are you doing here?”

I didn’t answer. I thought it was obvious. I stared into her eyes for a while. She was a brunette then, with pixie-short hair and lipstick the color of blood oranges. She wore a four-thousand-dollar dress and diamond earrings no woman had worn in two hundred years, because she had stolen them from a museum. To say she was beautiful would be to miss the point. She was anything you wanted her to be. I stood there for a while until she sighed and took me by the arm again. When we got back to the hotel, her dress and my suit were covered in mud. She walked me to my room and said good night in the hallway. I listened to her footsteps down the stairs. That was how the Asian Exchange Job started.

We went to work in the morning.

Back then, Marcus was the man to work for. He wasn’t a cartel kingpin yet. He was a full-time jugmarker. He wrote heists the way Mozart wrote music. They were big and beautiful and made money like you wouldn’t believe. Five years ago, everybody wanted a shot at one of his jobs, because everything he touched turned to gold. There was a dark side, even then, sure. I’d heard rumors about what happened to anybody who failed him. But those were just rumors. I saw firsthand what happened to the men who succeeded. They flew away rich. Very rich.

Two days later, Angela and I were on a chartered jet with the others, flying from Los Angeles to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Though it was
Marcus’s charter, he didn’t come with us. He was going to run the whole thing from Seattle by satellite phone. He was like Caesar when he was in the back of his restaurant, but none of us complained. He was going to make us rich.

I was the one who screwed it up.

6

The flight to Atlantic City took five hours.

The jet was a Cessna Citation Sovereign, a midsized two-engine the size of a semitruck, with a range of about three thousand miles. It was fueled and waiting when I arrived at the gate, and there was no security check. The man at the airport entrance took one look at Marcus’s limo and waved us through. We pulled up next to the plane on the tarmac and I walked directly up the stairs. I shook the pilots’ hands, but we didn’t bother with introductions. Time was of the essence here. We were wheels up in five minutes. We had twenty-five hundred miles to fly.

I carried a black nylon bag over my shoulder. Marcus had given me enough time to pick up a few things from my apartment. In the bag was my Colt .38 revolver with the bobbed hammer, which Marcus had given back. A toothbrush. Shaving kit. Makeup. Hair dye. Leather gloves. A few passports, driver’s licenses, state ID cards and two prepaid burner phones. The five grand from Marcus, and three black Visa corporate cards with a different alias on each one. At the bottom was a faded copy of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, translated by Charles Martin. I always travel light.

I was excited to get on the plane. It had been a long time since I’d
had a job like this. I’m very picky. When I’m not working, time seems to pass by in a haze. The days blend together, then the weeks, like a tape recorder set on Fast Forward. I sit in my apartment, at the desk facing the window, and watch the sun come up. I read the Greek and Latin classics again and translate them on yellow legal pads, some in German or French as well. Some days I don’t do anything else but sit there and read. My translations go on for hundreds of pages. Aeschylus, Caesar, Juvenal, Livy. Reading their words helps me think. When I’m not on the job, I don’t have any words of my own.

This was what I’d been waiting for—a job that, for once, wasn’t going to be
boring
.

The Cessna was beautiful on the inside. I’d never flown in that model before, but it was like most of the other private jets I’d seen. It had a nose like a hunting bird and two big engines under the tail. The takeoff was like an amusement-park ride, but once we got up five and a half miles, the flying was easy and the engine noise minimal. There were eight seats, plus two for the pilots, and the sticker price was just south of twenty million. For that amount of money, every seat was like first class. There was a full-sized bar in the back of the cabin, a flat-screen TV overhead tuned to a twenty-four-hour news channel, a satellite phone next to the coffee machine and a wireless connection to the Internet. When the copilot came back and said it was okay to walk around, I made a pot of coffee. I still felt uncomfortable. You can barely stand upright in one of these things.

I brought the coffee flask with me back to my seat, poured myself a cup and drank it. I poured myself another and opened up my book. Something was making me nervous, but I couldn’t quite figure out what.

After about twenty minutes, a story with the graphic
Shoot-out at the Regency
came on the television and I turned up the sound. The names of the victims were being withheld, but an old picture of Moreno in olive-drab fatigues flashed on the screen followed by a couple of shock shots of the hotel-casino tower and a line of bullet holes in the cement. A news crew was set up on the Boardwalk. I could make out where the heist
had gone down by the crowd of onlookers in the background. A female reporter said four people were dead at the scene, one of them a perpetrator, and then added that police suspected two more were on the run, which caught me off guard. I’d suspected there was a third shooter as soon as Marcus told me what happened, but this confirmed it. The heisters had detailed knowledge of the casino’s security system, the reporter said, and the investigation was well under way.

Then Jerome Ribbons’s mug shot came up.

I nearly spilled my coffee. The picture was a few years old, but it was definitely him.
Wanted for questioning
. Ribbons’s name was in all-capital letters at the bottom of the screen next to the number for the tip line, and the reporter did two whole sentences about it. They’d figured out his identity in less than four hours. Shit.

I pushed Pause and stared at the picture for a second. Blinked. Ribbons was maybe four years younger than he was supposed to be. He was scowling at the camera and holding up a booking number. He was a thick man, positively fat, with a boyish face and facial hair the thickness of a Brillo pad. He was hunched forward like a brown bear and his jaw hung open. His eyes were bloodshot and he looked exhausted. The shot had been taken by the Philadelphia Police Department, so he was still in street clothes. The tattoos on his one visible wrist and on his neck told a story. I could make out a stylized stag on his wrist. He’d been to prison and done five years, judging by the number of horns. He was gang affiliated, or used to be, according to the tattoo of a pistol under his chin. His nose had been broken and never quite fixed, and his knuckles were covered in scars.

I recognized him from somewhere. I couldn’t remember where.

Unless Ribbons had really messed up at the crime scene, they must’ve found his name when they ran Moreno’s fingerprints. Ribbons was probably on Moreno’s known-associates list. It wouldn’t have taken long to match the file photo of Ribbons against the surveillance video of the heist. He’s pretty unmistakable, considering his size and his history. There aren’t a whole lot of six-foot-four cons with stag tats. That would
be enough evidence to get his booking photo to the media. By mid-afternoon, everyone in the world would be on the lookout for Jerome Ribbons.

I looked at my watch. Three more hours to wheels down. This was going to make my job very challenging.

I pressed Play again and poured myself another cup of coffee. The report was almost over, and there wasn’t anything new when it came on again forty minutes later. I sat and thought about all the things that could’ve happened since six Eastern that morning. The investigation would’ve gotten huge fast, because any crime involving the Federal Reserve is a jurisdictional nightmare. The police would have detectives, sure, because people had been killed. The sheriff would have deputies running around, too, because there were fugitives on the run. The FBI would have field agents, because bank robbery is a federal crime. The Secret Service might be in on it, because they’re the ones authorized to investigate crimes against currency. The Treasury has its own enforcement agents and, hell, even the Federal Reserve banks have their own security branch. There were probably two dozen guys in cheap suits in Atlantic City by now.

And Ribbons was still at large.

I wondered why he hadn’t called Marcus.

When you don’t show up or call in after a heist goes down, you’re
vanishing
. Vanishing and ghosting are very different things. A whole crew ghosts after a job, so none of them get caught. One guy vanishes, so he personally doesn’t get caught. Vanishing is one of the cardinal sins of professional bank robbery. No matter what happens, no matter how messed up things get, you don’t vanish, and you
really
don’t vanish with the loot. If the plan says meet at the warehouse, you meet at the warehouse. If the plan says check into a motel, you check into a motel. If you vanish on your crew, the whole getaway falls apart, which is the first step to everybody getting caught. In most instances, if you get a bad feeling before the job goes down, there’s plenty of time to say you’re done, give up and go home. If it looks like things are going bad, you tell your crew
you’re not feeling it and walk away. The minute the job starts, however, you’re all in. Professionals take this very seriously. It’s a matter of pride for some people. Some people would rather die than vanish. In fact, many have.

So maybe Ribbons was dead.

Or maybe Marcus’s reputation had finally backfired.

Marcus was known for being horrible to the people who didn’t come through. Truly barbaric. The rep helped him keep things in line, sure, but I could see why it might make a guy like Ribbons run. I’d heard a story about an electronics man who’d forgotten to disable a bank alarm. Four of Marcus’s favorite men got locked up for five years each. Marcus went to the guy’s house and made him eat a whole jar of powdered nutmeg. Scooped it into his mouth with a spoon. That doesn’t sound so bad until you realize nutmeg’s got
myristicin
in it. A teaspoon’s okay, but not a whole jar. A few hours after the incident, the guy started dry heaving. Then he developed a headache and body pain like the hangover after a bar fight. An hour after that his heart started racing and his hands were shaking uncontrollably. It took nearly seven hours of that before the hallucinations started. Tripping hard and running a fever of 106, he took off all his clothes and scratched his face until it was covered in blood. A nutmeg trip can last for three days. Some people find it pleasant. Most think it’s hell on earth. In some versions of the story, Marcus leaves the guy with a gun with one bullet so he can shoot himself. In other versions, the guy bites off his own tongue and drowns in the blood.

If Ribbons thought that was in store for him, no wonder he hadn’t called.