Resurrection Express (11 page)

Three seconds is an eternity to a guy like me.

In just half that time, I had the perimeter scoped and rerouted, using custom blackware rigged to an infiltrator program.
Easy cheesy. Outer security stripped in two more seconds. The bad guys dead in the water, waiting for the big thrust. Toni wasn’t even out of the old man’s car by the time we moved. They were still on their way to the next club, an old man with brand-new candy on his arm tripping the light fantastic, while my father led A-Team in precise formation through the front ranks of bodyguards scattered across the main estate, taking them out quiet, no casualties. Duct tape and razor wire. A couple of tough guys in the bunch. It’s always easy to shut them up fast. Big guys go down harder. B-Team was mine, and we were already at the rear servants’ entrance, five guys waiting for the signal to move.

That’s how it works. You advance with military precision. You need that kind of training. The timing is crucial. One team forward, then the next, each waiting for the other’s word to move again, like fists climbing a ladder.

Twenty seconds and the whole perimeter was covered. Guns on every exit. Bodyguards and estate security brought down hard. The main windows rigged to blow. We used to call it getaway insurance. My eyes blinked sweat away as I glanced at Toni’s feed on the six tiny video windows across the top of my handheld: My wife running her nose along thick lines of cocaine in the back of a limo, not batting an eye while the old man talked his trash, pouring drinks, spouting the usual greasy gangster crap about all the things he could do for a woman like her. His voice, loud and clear over the wire, as my fingers worked the locks. No music. Just the silence of logic.

We were inside the house within three more seconds. Moving toward the main corridor. The vault six feet below us, just off the main service elevator. My father waiting with his team to cover our escape. Toni in the old man’s lap now, seducing him with one arm behind her back, the drugs hardly even affecting her steel-trap mind. My team down the elevator, into the giant steel-walled strong room. The vault, like a silver monolith, glinting off
the miners’ lights strapped to our heads. My mind and my fingers, working the numbers, forcing myself to be somewhere else, somewhere far away among walls of pure logic, so I couldn’t see his hands all over Toni. His hands, filling the tiny video windows now, touching her . . . and . . .

. . . 
and
 . . .

The wire exploded in my ear—glass and gunfire and screeching tires, twenty miles away, the limo punched into Swiss cheese from the outside by shooters. We were right on the vault when the shit came down. All that rapid-fire chaos, as Hartman’s guys stepped in. He’d warned us not to use Toni on this one, and my father told him to go fuck himself. He laughed and said he would get personally involved if we stuck to our guns, and my father told him to go fuck himself again. Hartman’s laughter was ringing in my memory and I was cursing our own stubbornness. I never thought he would really do it. When I look back, the whole thing seems so absurd.

Everything went straight down the toilet at our end. The bodyguard in the limo Hartman ambushed must have signaled a backup unit near the estate grounds—one of those X-factors you always try to anticipate, but you’re never quite ready for when that ice shock of adrenaline kicks in and the panic oozes up your throat, my father’s voice screaming that the world is ending and we fall back to Plan S.

S for
shotgun
.

At the vault, I was done with the retina scanner and halfway through the time lock when I started to hear the dull thump of explosions inside the house. Three of our own men blown down quick, cluster bombs and return fire hacking the bad guys to hell. The magnificent thunder-blitz of cracking artillery, screams and crashes and hard shells clattering on marble floor. Flesh and bone pounded by solid lead slugs—the kind that tear through a car door with muscle to spare. The hard metal-on-metal pump of
pistol-grip assault weapons, like deep pistons chunking in unison with the explosions. I held myself in the silent spaces between the muffled blasts and concentrated on getting the goddamn vault open.

While the good old days ended, just out of sight.

Across town, Toni was pulled from the back of the shredded limousine by David Hartman. Her shoulder, bleeding from a 9-millimeter slug scrape, her face betraying nothing. The old man, forced out right alongside her, shot twice in the stomach, stumbling in the cruel grip of dumb animals. Sliver views of Hartman glowering over the big guy on my six video screens, as I finally cracked open the vault door and sent in the team with their duffel bags and hand trucks.

Rule number one when things go south on a job:

Always go for the money first.

If things get real bad you’ll need every penny, depending on what side of the world you’re on when the fighting starts. And if you make it out clean, you’d better damn well have something to show your employers, especially when they’re already pissed off at you.

I leaned against the wall of the corridor just outside the thick steel door that gave so easy, listening to my father shoot it out with guys in plain black suits on the floor above us, knocking off human lives like they didn’t matter at all. Ringo Coffin, the gunslinger, the madman. My father, the shining example and our white knight at the wrong end of a suicide tear, screaming orders to his commandos in a war zone.

David Hartman, hovering on the high-definition video windows, towering over the old mob asshole, playing his song and dance.

Telling him who the boss really was.

The old man, cowering in crunches of broken glass, surrounded by dead bodyguards, his limo shot to shit in the alley just behind
him. My wife, held fast, her face still cold as steel, forcing back the pain. David’s voice, street Southern and smug as all hell:

“
I guess we got us a situation, don’t we, old man? But every situation has a solution. Just gotta be a creative thinker. I’m a reasonable guy most of the time.
”

The last shots fired in the living room, just above us. My father’s voice on the wire, telling me all clear, but to watch our asses. Like I needed that.

“
But what I can’t abide is the improper use of a beautiful lady. I told my people they had to handle this situation a certain way and they fucked it up. I guess you can hear me talking, right, Elroy? I told you not to use the lady. You’re way too smart a kid to fall back on sleazy tricks. Now, you’re on my shit list. You can take that to the bank.
”

I shook my head. Too absurd for words. David screws up the whole job, then calls me out for it while he gloats in the street like a cowboy, his thick gravy boiling in my ear like everything bad you think of when the word “Texas” springs into your head:

“
I mean, hell . . . I can understand it, of course. I know it’s such a gosh darn temptation to use the charms of a lady like this. But I’m a traditional guy. Ladies should know their place, after all. You follow me, right?
”

My team, just out of the vault now, hauling almost a hundred million in parcels. That kind of money fits in a much smaller space than you might imagine, even when it’s in laundered twenties and fifties. I remember rubbing my head, listening to Hartman’s voice, waiting for the next all-clear from my father. Then, the sound of a shotgun from the floor above me, blowing a muffled spasm in my throat, just on the edge of hearing, as I looked at the screen, watching Hartman perform:

“
But enough about the ladies. Let’s talk about this situation we’re in.
”

He stood over the fat old man, who was begging for his life. I couldn’t hear it. Just Hartman’s voice, right in the guy’s face:

“
It’s a king-hell shit pickle, ain’t it? But it also ain’t what you think. See, I could be real obvious about all this—just put some bullets in your head and be done with it. A lot of people like you think I’m a simple man. I’m here to tell you it just ain’t so. Men like me demand respect . . . but our needs are also very specific.
”

The video windows tilted and swayed just a bit, but when the static cleared, I could see three of Hartman’s shooters holding the old man down in the alley, forcing his arm onto the concrete, fingers scraping along bits of broken glass. I could hear his old bones creak and break as they manhandled him, and his screams cut through the wire like needles. I winced away from the monitors for just one second.

And when I looked again . . .

The meat cleaver was flashing in Hartman’s right hand.

“
This is what I need from you, old-timer. A little show of respect. A few fingers and we’ll call it even. Whatdaya say?
”

David’s signature. Stainless steel, stained by blood. The old man, still begging in a broken garble I couldn’t quite hear. My father’s voice, sounding the all-clear again. Just about time.

Didn’t feel like watching what happened next.

I snapped the handheld closed, threw the rig over my shoulder by the leather strap and followed my boys out, trying not to think about what was going on in that alley on the other side of town: Hartman’s sick game, all twisted up and dumbed down in the most inhuman gutter. His cruel laughter and his evil redneck drawl, endless and numbing.

Toni told me about it a month later.

She was just a voice on the phone by then.

It was the last time I ever spoke to her.

She said they took all ten fingers right there in the alley, then
shot the old man in the head while he begged them not to. Said she was in the hospital with a cracked collarbone for three weeks. And the whole time, Hartman was there, telling her the way things had to be from now on.

Telling her that if she went back to me, I was dead.

That was when she said I had to give her the divorce—or it would be my hands next on the carving block, and then my life. I knew Hartman would do it. He was crazy enough, foul enough. But I wasn’t going to let her go.

I’ll never let you go, Toni.

Never.

6

00000-6

INTO THE FUTURE

W
hen I wake up, I’m slumped on the bed, and the photo is on the floor. I pick it up and fold it again. Stash it under the bed, with my getaway money. Steel myself for the workday ahead. Have to finish the rig. Have to go in hard and strong.

Back to work, boy.

Back to goddamn work.

Before that happens, I open up the laptop on my bedside table. It’s a small deck, compact but powerful. I spend a few minutes running the electronic version of the photo through a series of image manipulation programs, searching for digital anomalies—things that might tip off a forgery. You can always tell when someone messes with something in Photoshop because the pixels will be corrupted in specific ways that only happen when a digital brush or a cloning stamp is used. There’s nothing like that in this file. But that probably doesn’t mean much. Forgers are also experts at covering their tracks. I use a few other programs to enhance the image. I look for details in the room. Other faces. Things that might look familiar. I can’t see anything. I close the laptop and stare off into nowhere.

Back to goddamn work.

•  •  •

T
he rig is finished a day and a half later. The main deck is a series of X58 military-spec motherboards, with six core CPUs, each with 18 gigs of memory, all hotwired together in a foldout custom chassis that’s packed with more software and hardware. Two additional flat-screens, three for the blackware, two for the main run itself. Two keyboards, six removable hard drives, one terabyte each. Wacom pad, virtual mouse, plenty of external power—a Thanksgiving turkey with all the trimmings. Bennett reads off the specs with robot precision. She’s fresh from a war, knows her business. A state-of-the-art material girl.

When we’re done with the rig, she breaks out a big black briefcase. Spins it and thumbs the latches.

“This is
my
specialty,” she says. “Are you familiar with current deep protocol?”

“Some of it.”

Haven’t heard that term used in a while. A little dated, kind of like calling the hackers “cyberpunks.” It means specialized gear not yet on the professional market. Military-issue. Stuff you’re not allowed to talk about, even if you happen to be in the club.
Especially
if you happen to be in the club. She opens the case and it’s Christmas morning. Gadgets straight from Q-Branch, nestled in black foam.

She reaches in and holds up a thick slab of black metal and plastic with a two-inch touch screen on it. It’s about the size of a smartphone, but has a molded rubber grip, like the handle of a high-end pistol. She clicks on the power and smiles at the technology in her hand.

“This is a Breaker 248 handheld. Cuts through silent alarms. I didn’t get to use them on my last tour, but they would have come in damn handy.”

“It’s a Swiss army knife,” I say, plucking it out of her hand. “You wire straight into an onsite power box and it finds channels off the main power grids. It’s even got a cell uplink that talks to
any satellites that might be watching the area. Shuts it all down. You can also wire remote sensors to kill certain circuit boards on command. This one is last year’s model. They replaced it six months ago with the 300.”

“I’m impressed. How did you know all that?”

“Friends in low places.”

She almost laughs. “I guess you really
were
keeping up on the inside.”

“If I’d had one of these bad boys, I could have escaped from that shithole easy. Their whole security grid was PC based.”

She takes another slab from the case and holds it up for me. “How about one of these?”

It looks like a modern radiation counter with an LED window, square with a Velcro harness so you can wear it on your arm.

“Kimble .5 Infiltrator,” I say. “Scans for anomalies in air density. Little micro-changes that give away a laser beam or a heat sensor.”