The Shell Game: A Fox and O'Hare Short Story (Kindle Single) (3 page)

“Yep, that’s me,” Kate said. “I’m all about appetite.” She took a sip of champagne. “And the job.”

“You take your work seriously,” Drake said, settling the champagne bottle back into the ice bucket.

“I do. I was an army brat, and I inherited a sense of pride in a job well done from my dad. I firmly believe in the American flag, apple pie, and upholding the law of the land.”

“Good to know,” Drake said, picking up an iPad up from the coffee table. “Let me show you the route we’ve planned.” He tapped the iPad and brought up a satellite map of L.A.’s west side. “The antiquities are arriving at LAX on a private jet. They’ll get in at eleven
A.M.
on Monday at one of the freight terminals along the Imperial Highway.” He pointed to a line of warehouses along LAX’s southern runway and the road that paralleled it. “We’ll transfer the crates under armed guard to an armored truck. The armored truck will travel east on the Imperial Highway and up the northbound 405 freeway to the Getty. Once we’re on the Getty property, their security team takes over. The Getty is basically a hilltop fortress, minus the cannons, so I don’t have any worries at that point.”

“Sounds good to me,” Kate said. “But I’d like to check out the route for myself and think about how I’d take the shipment from you.”

He set the iPad down. “You can think like a thief?”

“I can think like a soldier.”

“They don’t think alike.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A soldier’s strategy is all about achieving the mission objective, using blunt force and cold precision. But for a con man and thief like Nicolas Fox, it’s also about expressing himself through the cleverness and audacity of his technique. The value of the prize itself is almost secondary.”

“Theft as performance art? Who’s the audience?”

“You are,” Drake said.

There was a knock at the door, and Drake let the room service waiter into the suite. Conversation stopped while the food was set out. Kate was relieved to see steak
and french fries. She’d been worried that a guy looking like Drake might have ordered raw fish or snails or duck liver.

“This looks great,” she said to him, taking a seat. “Tell me about your company, Intertect.”

“We’re very good at what we do. If I told you more than that I’d have to kill you.”

Kate paused with her fork in her hand. “That’s usually just a clever thing to say.”

Nick refilled her champagne flute. “In the case of Intertect it would be death by boredom. We’re not a flashy company.”

Nick watched Kate march off to the elevator. She was cute, he thought. Earnest, refreshingly unpretentious, full of energy, too determined to be professional to flirt with him. And she was as dedicated to upholding the law as he was to breaking it. She was exactly what he needed in his life. She was going to be fun. He returned to his suite and phoned his three drivers to confirm that the evening’s activity was a go.

An hour later, Nick and his crew gathered outside the chain-link fence that surrounded the parking lot of Picture Car Universe Inc. Picture Car was in an industrial area of Sylmar in the San Fernando Valley. The fence was topped with razor wire, and the lot was filled with hundreds of vehicles of all kinds.

Wendy squinted into the dimly lit lot. “What is this place?”

Nick opened a utility box attached to the chain-link fence and pulled a couple wires. “It’s where Hollywood studios go to rent vehicles for their shows. Fake taxis, police cars, hearses, school buses, ambulances, anything on wheels. You name it, they’ve got it.” Nick closed the box and nodded to Evaristo. “The alarm is deactivated.”

Evaristo put his bolt cutter to the fence and went to work. “The security is pathetic.”

“That’s because most of these vehicles are props, cheaply dressed up to look like the real thing,” Nick said. “The rest are retired vehicles on their last legs that were bought on the cheap. They don’t have any value unless you’re a movie maker putting on a production.”

“Or a con man trying to trick somebody,” Artie said.

“Still, they could have made an effort,” Evaristo said. “A few armed guards or even a couple vicious dogs would have been nice.”

Artie gave him a look. “You enjoy fighting for your life?”

“How else do you know you’re alive?”

“Try breathing,” Artie said. “That’s usually a good sign.”

Evaristo made the last cut, a big chunk of fence fell onto the ground, and everyone stepped through the opening and into the parking lot.

Nick led them past ice cream trucks, army jeeps, gasoline tankers, and fake Model Ts.

Wendy stopped to admire three identical space-age cars with sleek, aerodynamic lines, bubble-topped cabins, gull wing doors, rear fins with propulsion rockets, and two elaborate laser cannons mounted on their front grills. They were prop cars from
Future Spies
, a short-lived science-fiction TV series.

“Let’s take these,” she said.

“Not going to happen,” Nick said. “We’re after the four armored trucks that are lined up in front of you.”

Nick had two mechanics waiting in a Culver City warehouse to modify the fake armored trucks to meet his special requirements. The mechanics would then pretend to be Intertect agents on the day of the heist.

“You’re no fun,” Wendy said. “Can we at least take the laser cannons?”

“You know they’re fake, right?” Nick asked her.

“Yeah, but they’re cool.”

“True,” Nick said. “You can take one.
Just one
.”

On Monday, Kate pulled her Crown Vic into the LAX terminal lot and saw that the armored truck was already in place. The sky was bright blue and cloudless, and the morning sun was quickly burning off the remnants of a marine layer. Kate was wearing a field uniform of running shoes, jeans, white T-shirt, and Kevlar vest. And she’d proudly
accessorized the outfit with her brand-new navy-with-yellow-lettering FBI windbreaker.

Drake was beside the armored truck, waiting for her. He was dressed in a dark suit and dark dress shirt and tie, and was flanked by two men who looked like agents from
Men in Black
. The two men wore black suits, impenetrably dark sunglasses, and matching Bluetooth earpieces.

Kate parked and approached Drake. “Looks like we’re good to go.”

“All we need is the plane.” He smiled at her. “We appreciate the FBI’s support.”

“Thank you, but I doubt you’ll need it. Your team looks competent.”

Kate understood that her presence was symbolic rather than critical. Klepper had his own crack security team, and it was hard for her to get worked up over this mysterious Nick Fox. She’d even had a brief thought that she was getting punked, but she’d immediately discarded it. She didn’t think she was important enough for the FBI to waste their time playing a joke on her. Even knowing all this, she felt a twinge of nervous excitement. This was the first time she’d been out of her cubicle for something more important than a coffee run. On the off chance that Nicolas Fox was real and stupid enough to make a move on the armored truck, she didn’t want to screw up.

Everyone turned and watched the midsize private plane touch down and taxi to a stop in front of the terminal. Drake climbed behind the wheel of the armored truck and drove it to the plane while his men in black kept their eyes on the ground crew.

The back door to the armored truck opened, and two more men in black came out. They exchanged a few words with Drake, and helped to form a security perimeter around the back of the plane. The ground crew opened the cargo hold and unloaded metal cases, not much larger than suitcases, into the rear of the armored truck. The last of the cases went in, two of the men in black climbed into the back of the vehicle with the antiquities, and the doors were closed and locked.

“Showtime,” Drake said to Kate, as he climbed back behind the wheel of the armored truck. “See you on the other side.”

Kate ran for her Crown Vic and followed Drake out of the lot, heading east on Imperial Highway. They took the on-ramp to the eastbound 105 freeway. Traffic was light for the next two miles, and the transition to the northbound 405 freeway was easy. There were six lanes on the 405. Drake and Kate stayed in the fifth lane, the one to the
left of the slow lane, keeping their speed at a leisurely fifty-five miles per hour.

An armored truck merged from the Jefferson Boulevard on-ramp into the right lane. The armored truck was identical in every way to the one in front of her, including the license plate.

A shot of adrenaline burned through Kate’s chest. It would be weird enough to have two identical armored trucks in front of her. Two identical armored trucks with identical license plates were impossible. The intel had been true. There was going to be a robbery attempt on the armored truck carrying the Peruvian antiquities. The second armored truck was going to be used to switch and confuse. She grabbed her phone and called for backup.

“Agent needs assistance,” she said, and she gave her location.

Nick swerved into the next lane, as Wendy Rhee, in the second armored truck, took his former position in front of Kate. They were now at the merge point where the traffic from the westbound Marina Freeway spilled onto the 405, and Nick could see that Artie Sondel was right on time.

Artie merged into the slow lane and quickly took his position beside the other armored trucks. There were now three identical armored trucks traveling side by side in front of Kate on the northbound 405.

Kate looked at the armored trucks in front of her and knew there were two possible scenarios here. The first was that Drake was being boxed in by the identical armored trucks. The second was that Drake was part of the crew. Either way, she needed to do something to mark Drake’s armored truck before it was lost in the shell game.

She lowered her driver’s side window, pulled out her Glock, held it as steadily as she could in her left hand, and opened fire on Drake’s armored truck. Her aim wasn’t great with her left hand, but that was okay, the armored truck was a big target, and she
accomplished her goal. She’d shot out a taillight and put some pocks in the body of Drake’s armored truck, marking it so she could tell it apart from the two decoys.

She dropped the gun onto her lap and made a second call to dispatch.