Meaner Things (17 page)

“Documents recording illegal transactions, anything we can send to the appropriate authorities for them to investigate.”

“Compromising photos we can post on the internet?”

“That too.”

“Real dirty tricks, eh?”

“No dirtier than what he’s doing to young girls.”

“Right. I agree with the stealth bit, Mike. But there still could be violence.”

I gave him a puzzled look. “How’d ya mean?”

“Creeping around in the dark has risks, doesn’t it?” he replied. “Silent alarms for one thing. That could get us caught.”

“I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen. Anyway, that’s not violent.”

“It only takes a trigger-happy security guard to mistake a crowbar for a shotgun. Then suddenly it’s violent,” Charlie said gloomily.

I opened my mouth to say something reassuring about minimising risks, then decided against it. I sat back and thought about what Charlie had just said. He was more experienced than me in these things, and he was right. Missing one small detail could spell our doom. Even the most extensive preparation couldn’t cover everything.

I reminded myself that penetrating the impenetrable was my forte. I thought about my escape from the museum warehouse years ago, and reminded myself that I was good at handling the unforeseen too.

“See ya, Charlie. Gotta have an early night.” I finished the tepid lager, glad there was no more left.

“Not like you to be early to bed,” he replied.

“I have to be up with the birds tomorrow. I intend to be at the vault door bright and early.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Yup, I’m going to pick Jeff D’s brains without him knowing it.”

“Good luck with that.”

I drove the Corolla back to my place while going over the plan in my head. I was determined to make significant progress tomorrow. To do so I needed some very specific information from Jeff D. about operating procedures with the video tapes. I couldn’t just waltz into the security room and ask him – the door was kept locked anyway – so I would have to engage him in conversation again while he was opening the vault. And perhaps also when he was closing it in the evening, though that would be pushing my luck considerably.

I said a silent prayer to my Irish ancestors for the gift of the gab.

*

I left the vault and walked wearily towards the elevator, leaving Jeff D. to lock up behind me. I’d barely got a word out of him this morning and now he’d been even less communicative. Worse still, I’d pushed too hard and he’d grown suspicious. He wanted to know “Why all the questions, Mr. Robie?” I’d nearly died inside when he’d said that.

I wasn’t sure if I’d ruined the entire heist, but I just might have; time would tell. If I got a call from Boylan in the morning or, worse still, some security guards knocked on my office door, I wouldn’t be too surprised.

I felt a great heaviness on my shoulders as I stepped into the elevator and pressed the button to close the doors, leaving Jeff behind. In the foyer I nodded to Roger G. and slunk out the glass doors, thoroughly depressed. This wasn’t how it was supposed to have gone.

I wandered aimlessly down the street and came across a swanky pub with people sitting outside at grey metal tables and drinking pints of beer. I looked up and saw that it was called ‘The Knotty Shillelagh’. There were gold shamrocks all around the doorway and, beside it, a cardboard cut-out of a little leprechaun guy with his fists in the air. In other words, it was a typical Vancouver
faux
Irish tavern, kitschy as hell and about as authentically Irish as Gandhi’s big toe. In my present mood, I went in anyway.

I ordered a pint of Harp lager, known as fly piss in its native land but priced here as if it were ambrosia of the gods, and sat at the bar, sipping it slowly. In my mind I went over my brief conversations with Jeff D., berating myself for having made such a pig’s ear of both attempts. They didn’t get any better the more I replayed them in my head.

Perhaps my ambitions had been nothing more than impossible daydreams; my grandiose plans one long chain of improbabilities. If so, the daydream balloon had now burst; links in the chain had broken. My second pint of fly piss engendered even more of these maudlin mental images.

I picked up the little round coaster under the pint glass and read it for the first time. ‘Old Irish pub, closed during Mass’ it said. The banality of this place knew no depths and I decided it was time to make my way home. I drained the last dregs from the bottom of the glass and laid it down on the beer-soaked coaster.

“Mr. Robie, fancy meeting you here.” The voice was terrifyingly familiar. I’d just been hearing it in my head, over and over again.

“Hi Jeff,” I replied.

“It’s been a tough day for you too, eh?” he said, as he sat down on the barstool beside me. I gave him a welcoming smile broad enough to charm a shark.

“Lovely to bump into you,” I replied, “Can I buy you a pint? The Harp here is on tap. It’s very good.”

“Thanks very much, I think I’ll have one of those.” He shuffled his taut, muscular rump on the tiny stool. “By the way sir, I want to apologise for being rude to you earlier. Had a bunch of things on my mind, girlfriend problems, stuff like that.” He smiled defensively. “Sorry about that.”

“Not at all,” I replied, “Let’s grab our pints and go over there to the snug where we can talk better.”

16.

TAKING SHAPE

“I’ll never travel in the back of that van again,” Emma said.

She and I were sitting in the threadbare valley in the middle of Charlie’s ancient grey sofa, its springs protesting loudly every time either of us moved even slightly. I happily submitted to being pressed, shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh, tightly against Emma while Charlie roamed the windows, shutting venetian blinds, closing curtains, and drawing drapes of various sizes, shapes and materials. The room grew dark and shadowy and I switched on a table light next to the couch. The bulb must have been all of twenty watts.

“Saving on hydro bills?” I asked Charlie.

“Your eyes will adapt quickly,” he replied.

Emma leaned to her side and switched on another lamp that was slightly brighter.

“Sorry for getting here so late,” I said, “But I’m only just back from downtown. I got held up unexpectedly.” I hoped that Emma wouldn’t smell the beer on my breath. “Anyway, I thought we should discuss progress so far,” I continued. “First on the agenda is some good news.”

“And what might that be?” Charlie asked, sitting near the couch.

“Well, it
might
be that it’s Open Vault Day at the Zheng Building tomorrow.”

Charlie’s eyes widened in surprise.

“But it’s not,” I hastened to add, noting the rapid frown on his face, “I’m just kidding.”

“So what is it then?” Emma said.

“It’s about the video cameras.”

“There’s far too many of those,” Charlie replied, “Must have been a sale on that day or something.”

I nodded. “That’s true; they’re all over the place. But the good news is they rely on them too much. The guards hardly ever bother to patrol anymore.”

“How does that help us?” Charlie asked.

“It’s like this . . .”

I went over my discovery that the cameras recorded on old-fashioned videotape, rather than onto a computer hard drive. And, that the tapes were changed each night, with the old ones stored in a metal cabinet in the security room.

“OK,” Charlie said, “But you already told me that last night.”

“Yeah, but Emma didn’t know. Now here’s the new news. I had a very interesting conversation with Jeff D. today. Very enlightening.”

“Do tell,” Charlie replied.

I made an on-the-spot decision not to tell them about the Irish pub. Somehow it didn’t seem professional. “I must get up early more often. Jeff D’s much more talkative first thing. He says there are only two guards there overnight. He often takes that shift himself for a bit of overtime.”

“Forgive me for not getting too excited yet. With your ‘no violence rule’, two guards are still too many.”

I wagged a finger at Charlie. “Patience, my man. Here’s the best bit: the guards don’t watch the monitors overnight.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Charlie shook his head in disbelief. “What do they do if not watch the monitors?”

I leaned forward. “Jeff says there’s no point, as the building’s virtually empty. No members of the public can be admitted, the tenants have almost all gone home, and the vault is locked. He says the guards have a room up on the third floor, a kitchen with a coffee machine and a locker for their ordinary clothes; that sort of place. The night guards hang out there.”

I paused and let that sink in. Charlie seemed to be in deep thought. “With no-one watching them, the video cameras are as good as blind,” he finally said.

“That’s right,” I agreed. “The cameras are recording all night, but the monitors aren’t being watched and the tapes aren’t reviewed afterwards either, not unless there’s some reason to.”

“Such as a break-in,” Charlie said.

“Such as a break-in. But all we have to do is force a simple lock on the security room door and take the tapes with us when we leave. Voila! No more video evidence!”

“What about the older tapes? Like the ones of you pirouetting around in the hallways?” Charlie persisted, determined to rain on my parade.

“No problem,” I replied, “We can take those too. They keep them in a big cabinet along the back wall. With any luck, they’ll be marked with the month and day.”

“How the hell did you get all that out of Jeff?” Charlie asked.

“Impressed, eh? I knew you would be. It was amazing. Jeff D. would hardly shut up once I got him going. I almost skipped home afterwards, I can tell you.”

“Good work,” Charlie admitted.

I grinned. “Just the gift of the gab, really. Nothing to it.” I reached into my briefcase and pulled out some notes. “I’ve also figured out how we’re going to get inside the building.”

“Through the garage, right?”

“Right, it beats the front door, that’s for sure. It would take a small tank to get in that way and all we’d do would be set off an alarm and have the police on our tails in five minutes flat.”

I consulted the notes on my lap and pulled out a diagram. “But the garage entrance is perfectly possible. Here’s what we do: we – that is
you
, Charlie – construct a homemade remote to trigger the garage door from the outside. Can you do that?”

“Sure, it’s easy. Well, relatively. Garage doors like that, the older ones anyway, operate on one of one thousand and twenty-four radio frequencies. It’s programmed into the circuitry on a series of twelve switches. All I need to do is take an electronic scanner and run through all the possible frequencies until I find the right one.”

“How long would that take?” I asked.

“At most, about thirty minutes. Once I know the frequency I can put a remote control together, using an RF transmitter and circuit boards. Then we’ll be able to open the garage anytime we want.”

“What about video cameras?” Emma said.

“There’s one over the garage door,” I replied. “But that’s the beauty of what I was saying earlier – there’s no-one watching them, and we can take the tapes before we go.”

“We’ll be like ghosts in the night,” Charlie said.

“Evaporating like mist in the morning,” I replied, catching the poetic mood.

*

I approached the garage entrance at my usual snail’s pace, giving it a good look as I passed. Andy was inside, but I didn’t try to catch his eye. I was on foot today and it would have looked strange if I’d tried to engage him in conversation.

I went over what Charlie and Emma and I had discussed last night. My plan for entrance to the building depended upon learning the frequency of the garage door opener. Which, in turn, meant one of us – and it would probably have to be Charlie – loitering around on this street, after dark, for up to thirty minutes while fiddling about with a suspicious-looking device. Even then, he’d have to trigger the door a few times to make sure that he’d nailed the frequency down precisely. I had driven out of the building at night, after hours, and knew the racket the big metal garage door made as it clattered up slowly and then clattered all the way down again equally slowly.

But we had no other option as far as I could see. We had to be certain that the mechanism, like the rest of the equipment in the building, was an old one. A newer model would have a rolling frequency transmitter which automatically changed the code after every use. That would be considerably harder for Charlie to crack. He wasn’t sure that he could do it.

I looked around me and decided that it could have been a lot worse. The street was quiet and in the middle of the night it would be virtually dead. The garage exit was far enough away from the main building for the opening and closing of the metal door not to be heard by the night-time security guards. With decent luck, Charlie should be able to do his business here uninterrupted.

On the night of the heist we’d enter via the garage and get into the building itself through the alternative door, the one that opened with an ordinary key rather than a swipe card. That would get us into the building as far as the elevators, which in turn would get us down to the vault level. So far, so good.

This was provided there weren’t any alarms or motion detectors I had overlooked, and the night guards stayed in the kitchen room while we were entering and exiting. For all I knew, they might be fond of roller-skating up and down the corridors or skateboarding down the back stairs. More seriously, it would be normal for guards to have some sort of nightly ritual of patrolling the building, even if it was just to stretch their legs.

Then there was the possibility of bumping into some very late-working tenant, or of a guard being called at some ungodly hour to open the garage gate for a tenant who had just flown in from another time zone.

In some ways, it was all a game of chance in which the best I could do was increase the odds considerably in our favour.

Ironically, the safest place in the building for us would be the vault level itself. With the vault’s time lock engaged, there could be no reason at all for a tenant or even a guard to go down to the vault floor at night. The guards all knew that opening the vault at any time other than between seven a.m. and seven p.m. would send an automatic alert to the security company, which in turn would alert the police. Under the assumption that a guard was being forced to open the vault, the cops would come charging in, guns raised.

That was a scenario I didn’t want to dwell on. On the other hand, it did mean that there would be zero traffic on the vault level from seven p.m. every Friday to seven a.m. the following Monday. That left us a lovely sixty hours window. Now I just had to figure out how to get into the vault, then into the safe deposit boxes.

So far I had no clue how to do it without getting caught.

*

“I need to speak to Boylan right away,” I insisted. I stood outside the vault door, where my cell phone would work, and repeated the demand for the third time.

“Mr. Boylan is in a meeting.” A woman’s voice, cultured, assured. Probably his personal secretary.

“Then you must get him out and tell him to come down to the vault immediately,” I said.

“Impossible, sir.”

I explained my situation to her and she finally agreed to inform Boylan. I clicked the phone shut and allowed myself the ghost of a smile.

Ten minutes later Boylan arrived. He rushed up to me, his face flushed and agitated. I was about to make things considerably worse for him.

“What seems to be the matter?” he demanded, even though I’d already explained it on the phone.

I held up the stub of metal. “My key broke in the lock,” I said, “And I must get into my safe deposit box before closing time today.” It was Friday and already four o’clock in the afternoon.

“That’s impossible,” he replied, “Our keys don’t break.”

Well, they do when Charlie files the end of the stem down and I twist it really hard against the lock, I felt like saying.

“I think I twisted it too hard,” I said, “It was rather stiff.” This made no sense, of course, but it would do.

“Show me.”

I buzzed back into the vault again and showed Boylan my safe deposit box. A sharp sliver of broken key was sticking out of the keyhole. He looked from it to my hand and back again, as if deciding I must be some kind of Hulk in disguise.

“I’ll have it fixed first thing on Monday morning,” he said.

“Sorry, that’s not good enough,” I replied sternly. “I have some items in my box that I simply must have access to today.” I added for effect, “My business depends on it.”

“That’s impossible; I can’t get our locksmith that quickly.”

Our
locksmith
. Good, that’s what Charlie had reckoned. Every vault has its own locksmith, he’d said.

“I repeat: you must release my property from your box before closing time today.” I hoped the legal-sounding terms would conjure up an image of a nasty lawsuit in Boylan’s mind. I hardened my voice even more. “If you do not comply, my business losses will be substantial and I will be forced to hold you liable.”

His hand went up to his hair in an involuntary motion as he thought about what to do. His lips compressed and I knew I’d won.

“I’ll call our locksmith and tell him it’s an emergency situation,” he said.

*

The locksmith must not have been busy at all as he arrived thirty minutes later, expensive-looking toolbox in hand. He looked lean and fit for his age, which must have been around early sixties. He greeted Boylan with a curt nod.

“This is Peter Davenport,” Boylan explained to me, “He handles all our locks for us.”

I shook his free hand and explained the situation to him. As soon as I mentioned the broken key he frowned and I sensed I was skating on thin ice.

“These keys simply didn’t break, Mr. Robie,” he said.

I looked him straight in the eye. “This one did.”

His cheeks flushed and I thought he was going to challenge me head on. He obviously smelled a rat. Then he seemed to consciously relax.

“OK, well I’m here now and it shouldn’t take too long to fix. As there are contents already in the box you’ll have to be with me as I open it.”

“Of course,” I replied. This was exactly what I wanted.