A Heist Story

by Ellen Simpson

  Shelly met her at the subway at four-forty on Monday afternoon, and they walked together, in silence, to the nondescript office building. In his notes, Charlie had documented the exact route in and out of the building, once they slipped by security.

  “Did he do a trial run?” Kim wondered out loud when Marcey showed her the entry toward the front of another journal. All the pieces were there. All they had to do was put them together.

  “He could have. This is too well-documented to be anything less than a job a few days away from completion.” Shelly ran her fingers down the pages of Charlie’s notebook. “There are places here where it looks like he had a false start or two. It isn’t like him to work solo either. I think Rio shook him.”

  “Because he got arrested?” Rio was always this story in the back of everyone’s mind when it came to Charlie. Marcey wanted to know more about what had happened then, but everyone was mum on it. There was no sharing that story.

  “Everyone gets arrested in this line of work. What happened to Charlie was more than that, you know? It was a culmination of so many things, allies betraying him, the mark getting the jump on him, Kat’s turn…” Shelly shook her head. “It was a mess.”

  “Was that when they found out Kat was involved with the Interpol agent?” Marcey asked.

  Gwen shook her head, her expression closed off but conveying a hurt Marcey couldn’t ignore. “No, that was when Kat Barber used her connection to Interpol to expose William for what he was. A double agent.”

  Marcey thought about that conversation now, trailing after Shelly into the office building. It had the musty, damp carpet smell Marcey associated with all old buildings. There was another, more sickly scent underneath it, like something had died in the wall somewhere and no one had bothered to go find the source of the smell. She wrinkled her nose and strode purposefully toward the door. Marcey had been around the block enough to know that half of any good crime was confidence.

  Shelly walked into the large atrium like she owned the place. It was a great way to divert attention, but it soon fell sour. Everyone here looked as though this awful building was in the process of digesting them, cooking their insides and slowly killing their will to live. Marcey let that look wash over her and affect her demeanor. Shelly could look authoritative enough to push past the reactions of a woman in charge. Her presence was commanding, but in an understated way that indicated years of practice at being both visible and invisible at the same time. Marcey, however, was content to fade into the background and blend in with all the other harassed twenty-somethings drifting across the atrium.

  Shelly stepped to one side of the door. She was blocking the security camera’s view of the doorway, speaking to Marcey in a low, reassuring voice. “This is it, kid,” she said. “Your moment of truth.”

  Marcey pulled the lock picks from her back pocket and exhaled. Selecting the snake pick and the slanted diamond wedge, she pushed them into the lock. The tumblers whined in protest but soon opened as easily as a knife sliding through butter. One, two, three. The fourth was tricky. Marcey caught her tongue between her teeth and wiggled the snake pick.

  “It’s not going.”

  “You know how to pick locks, don’t you?” Shelly raised an eyebrow.

  “I practiced all weekend!” Marcey hissed. She shoved the snake pick between her teeth and grabbed another, this one long and narrow, more of a wrench than anything else. She twisted the diamond pick upward, her wrist screaming in protest.

  Thunk.

  The door swung open to reveal a hallway. Marcey pulled the picks out quickly and used the hem of her shirt to wipe off the door handle before shoving the picks, still loose, into her back pocket. Shelly glanced up the hall before looking back out into the lobby. A quick glance into the open area behind the guard’s station revealed that the security guard was absorbed in his iPad. He hadn’t even noticed them.

  Marcey’s heart raced in her chest. This was the moment of truth. Charlie had done the mapping, but he hadn’t done a dry run. Marcey hadn’t mentioned that to Shelly. She wanted this to go off without a hitch. Telling Shelly that this was entirely her plan, as opposed to building off of Charlie’s preset seemed like a terrible idea. Fear clawed at her throat, choking the air out of her. Marcey jerked her head slightly to clear it.

  “We go left.” She led Shelly down a long hallway. It was dark, for the most part. Off the hallway were rooms containing bookshelves upon bookshelves of files. Marcey barely saw them. She was counting doorways. PN-45-A-76 was housed in the seventh door to the left, back five rows of shelves on the back side toward the floor.

  They ducked into an alcove when a clerk hurried by, a stack of paperwork on a cart pushed before him. He hummed Drake as he worked, selecting files and putting others away. Marcey flattened her back against the wall as he walked by. They went unnoticed. And she exhaled shakily.

  Shelly’s fingers closed around Marcey’s hand and tugged her forward into the seventh door on the left. It stood open, but that was not uncommon. Each of these doors was like that, left partway open. Was it because there was so much crap stored in here that the security system that rented the space wasn’t worried that anyone would figure out what was tucked away in their archive? That had to be it. Nothing else made sense.

  PN-45-A-76 was a small brown box containing a flash drive on a keychain with a Japanese anime cat’s face printed on it. Marcey stared down at it for a moment before tugging it out and attaching it to her keys. She put the box back and grabbed a few other smaller file boxes. “Anything else we need in here?” she asked Shelly.

  Shelly had found one of the carts. Marcey dumped the files into it and fell into step beside Shelly. They were silent until the kid with the cart backed out of the room. “Oh,” Marcey said. She smiled, not unkindly, at the kid with the headphones. “Haven’t seen you down here before…”

  “I’m new,” he confessed. “I didn’t realize there were other clerks.”

  Shelly laughed. “Oh, there aren’t. We’re just down here because we’re not used to you being here. That vacancy’s been a pain in the ass.”

  He smiled sheepishly. “Ha, they said it was open for a while.”

  That’s how Charlie did his dry run. No one down here to ask any questions. So why not take it then? Marcey frowned but said nothing.

  Shelly flipped him a set of keys. “Thanks for keeping an eye on the place. Looks like we won’t be down here as much now.”

  He smiled. Later, Marcey would understand that her reaction, to bristle and ask why Shelly was making herself memorable to a person they were actively stealing from, was unfounded. Shelly was a transgender woman. She was memorable in her very presence. It was the act of creating a memory that was not about her face or her voice or her height that dictated her role on the con. This was as foolproof a defense mechanism as anything Marcey had ever seen.

  She felt like an asshole, sitting in what had to be one of the last internet cafés in all of New York, waiting for Kim and Gwen to come and meet them.

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Memory is like a sieve. People look at you, they make a snap judgment. They look at me, they make an entirely different snap judgment. What you have to do is redirect that judgment onto something that, ultimately, makes you forgettable. A sieve can only catch so much, you know.”

  “So, what would I want to distract from?”

  “The fact that you have no idea what you’re doing would be a good start.” Shelly laughed. “Or the fact that you’re a midget.”

  “Not all of us are fucking giants,” Marcey grumbled. The anime cat keychain dangled from her keys. “This isn’t going to like, infect the entire city with some virus, is it?”

  “Fuck if I know,” Shelly answered. “That’s Kim’s job. If I were to touch a computer it’d blow up. But that’s probably why we’re here, to see what might happen.”

  “What could be on here?”

  Shelly shrugged. “No idea.”

  Marcey st
ared at the smiling cat. “I hope it’s nothing bad.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Marcey, Found Out

  Kim wasn’t able to crack the flash drive at the internet café, nor was she able to break into it using the desktop computer she’d built from scratch in the basement of her parent’s bookshop. Gwen was trying other contacts that might know something about the Monument’s design, and Shelly was asking around as well. Everyone was busy with other contacts, the criminal sort of contacts that Marcey didn’t really have. It left Marcey with very little to do.

  On Friday, Marcey started her monthly pilgrimage up to see Darius. She was halfway between Albany and Saratoga Springs, heading north on Route 9, when Kat called her. There were still patches of snow on the ground, patchy bits of white against the muddy brown of spring starting to set in. Marcey glanced around, looking for cops, before she answered the phone.

  “I’m driving.” She fiddled with her headphones, jamming them into her ears one handed and then using both hands, resting on top of the steering wheel, to plug the headphones into her phone’s jack.

  “Are you?” Kat sounded distant, as though filtered through a fog. Marcey’s eyes narrowed. It was affected nonchalance. “Well, if talking to me is illegal, I’d best let you go—”

  “No, no, it’s okay,” Marcey interjected. “I’m fine, I have hands-free. What’s up?”

  “I wanted to check up on you, see how you were doing. I got a call from Kim Montou asking what I knew about encryption keys… Have you gone and found yourself a crew?” There was a pause before Kat added, almost offhandedly, “I wish you’d have told me, Marcey. I could’ve helped you get them to commit.” There was disinterest in Kat’s voice. Marcey guessed she didn’t want to talk about this.

  “She called you?” Marcey let out a short bark of laughter. The Kim Montou Marcey was starting to get to know again was not the sort of person who readily asked people for help. “God, she must be really stumped.”

  “Or the encryption is based in something other than a computer language. My appreciation of art led me to a different possibility.” Kat paused. “She was less than amused when I told her this, though.”

  “Oh, you appreciate the art of messing with Kim’s head now?”

  “You think so poorly of me, Marcey.” Kat’s smile crept into her voice. Marcey could picture her: tapping her finger on her chin, a coy smile on her face. Her eyes though—they would be deathly serious, as they always were. “I wouldn’t mess with anyone’s head unless they asked.”

  “Well, in that case.” Marcey rolled her eyes. “Were you able to help her out at all? The key, we think, will get us into this flash drive that Charlie had identified as a potential aid to getting into the Monument.”

  “I think I was able to provide her with a good starting point. The cypher, as far as she can tell, is based on something utterly inane. I told her maybe counting brush strokes would help.”

  “Counting…brush strokes?”

  “Quite,” Kat agreed. “It’s an old form of communication. It would give the key to only one who was in the presence of the work of art in question. It allows a certain level of discretion therefore. And a security measure to boot.”

  “You think the key is in the painting—”

  “Yes, and Kim was able to break in.” There was a sound like rustling papers in the background. “I suspect you’ll be wanting more of my expertise going forward.”

  The pronouncement was so innocent, but it was the way Kat said it, casual, as though there was nothing to it, that sent a shock of fear down Marcey’s spine. Fear of losing the small modicum of control she had over the situation. Kat could take command and Marcey would follow her without question, but that was not the game. For this game to work, Kat had to be the one doing Marcey’s bidding, not the other way around, or else Marcey would find herself in hot water. No, that was unacceptable. Marcey thought back to the plan, to Charlie’s instructions, and steeled herself for what was to come. “No. I’m going to do this in the usual way, Kat. Charlie did it that way, I want to as well. The plot gets too complex if there are too many players.”

  “I don’t know if you’ve realized, darling, but there are too many players to begin with.” Without another word, Kat disconnected the call. Kat’s reaction was as predictable as any Marcey had ever encountered.

  “Fuck it,” Marcey muttered. Her eyes were trained on the road. The forest that lined Route 9 was starting to fade away into the town of Saratoga. She could deal with deciphering the mercurial nature of Kat Barber another day.

  An hour and a half later, Marcey pulled into the village of Dannemora. The drive was monotonous, and she barely noticed the side roads with their guards in high towers as she wound around the outer walls of the super-max part of the prison. The part of the prison where Darius spent his days was not here, but rather in the old, brick structure with high, narrow windows topped in a snarl of barbed wire. This was where the prison did group therapy with a set of low-risk inmates. Darius had gotten his GED and bachelor’s here, in the shell of an old mental hospital.

  Marcey swung into a visitor’s parking spot, her front bumper nudging a lingering early April snowbank. Outside, the temperature was chilly, and Marcey hurriedly buttoned her jacket. She made her way inside, up the shallow steps and through the doors.

  It always struck her how easy it was to walk into the prison. It looked a bit like an elementary school, a putrid shade of fifties industrial teal flooring and tile rising high up against the wall. The visiting area was off to her right and the guard station to her left. Marcey passed her driver’s license over to the guard. He smiled at her. He was always at the guard station when Marcey visited. Always smiling and always watching her every move.

  “Ms. Daniels.” He typed her name into the antiquated computer that sat yellowing before him. “It’s good to see you back.” He sucked his teeth and shook his head. “I swear you come up more than anyone else.”

  “I have to.” Marcey rose onto her toes to get a full look into the guard station. They sat at least three feet above the floor in the atrium. She grinned at the guard. “Otherwise I wouldn’t get to see you, Herb. Or the lovely scenery.”

  “Must be nice to get outta the city for a while,” Herb replied. He hit a key again and frowned. The computer made a whirring, whining noise and he tried again. “That can’t be right… This says you’ve been taken off the list of approved visitors…” His brow furrowed. He clicked a key, muttering. “Did Johnson…?”

  Marcey’s stomach dropped, settling somewhere around her knees. Something had happened. That was why Kat had called.

  Herb got up. The chair behind him creaked. He picked up her license in one hand and headed toward the back of the room. There was another door at the back, but Marcey didn’t know where it went.

  She craned her neck to see why she’d been rejected. The bulletproof glass that surrounded the guard station made it impossible to see anything.

  All the words of warning about Kat Barber, about her relationship with the law and with Wei Topeté echoed in Marcey’s mind. Fuck. She was so fucked. Why hadn’t Kat warned her?

  A balding man that Marcey had never seen before returned with Herb, his expression grave. He leaned over, moused through a few screens, and shook his head. He frowned, then glanced from Marcey to her license to the screen. “Ms. Daniels, have you been out of the country in the past few weeks?”

  She nodded, carefully mute. She wasn’t giving them anything.

  “You’ve been flagged by ICE.”

  “What does immigration care where I’ve been?”

  Herb shrugged. “Beats me. I’d get in touch with your local DA’s office. Usually these sorts of things sort themselves out pretty quickly. It’s probably just precautionary.”

  His supervisor scowled and clicked a few more keys.

  A strange ringing filled Marcey’s ears. “Okay.” She backed away slowly. “I’ll get in touch with the DA’s office and try and figure out what’s
going on.”

  Herb and his supervisor glanced at each other. “You do that, Ms. Daniels. Don’t forget your license, though.”

  She had to get out of there. Marcey swallowed, hurried back over to the guard station to collect her wallet and walked as briskly as she dared out of the prison. Once she was beyond the heavy exterior doors, she broke into a run and practically threw herself into the car. She sat there, fingers tight on the steering wheel, and exhaled shakily. She was so fucked.

  They knew.

  They knew who she was and what she was doing. They knew that she had Charlie’s book. The one secret Marcey’d been desperate to keep from Topeté seemed to be out in the open now. Kat had to have said something. It was the only way. But why? Marcey’s thoughts raced. This was retribution for what had happened in London. Marcey wasn’t stupid; she knew what she’d done to Topeté. And if Topeté had pulled this, it meant that Johnson’s knowledge of this enterprise wasn’t far behind Topeté’s own. Christ, she was fucked.

  Marcey was almost surprised she hadn’t been arrested again. Linda always was the petty, vindictive type.

  There was nothing left to do. With a final glance up at the prison, Marcey choked down her anger and gunned the engine. She would fix this. She would deal with Johnson and Topeté too. They’d never fuck with anyone like this again.

  It was a five-hour drive back to the city, alone with her thoughts and her seething anger. She was exhausted by the time she pulled off into a small rest area south of Albany to pee and get some coffee. She drove for three hours along back roads through the Adirondack Mountains, stewing. The thick forests killed any chance of cell phone reception. It was for the best; she was too angry to talk at the start of her trip southward anyway.

  She called Kat from where she sat in the rest area parking lot. The phone rang three times before a sleepy-sounding Kat answered. “You fucked me,” Marcey growled into the phone.