“So I can come here in the evenings and do some work?”
“Sure,” he replied, “Just not in the vault.” He gave the odd staccato laugh again.
*
I left the building early, as it wasn’t important to stay on my first day. At the end of the block I popped into a coffee shop I’d scouted earlier and sat in an alcove beside the door, where I couldn’t be seen from outside. I watched the next half-a-dozen customers come in: a young mother with two small kids; an elderly man in a smart suit; two ‘office secretary’ type women avidly gossiping; and a bald guy with tufty hair above his ears who reminded me of Jeffery Deaver. It was probably a bit paranoid to think that anyone from the Zheng Building might be following me, but I had to be sure. None of these people looked the part, so I strolled out the café’s side exit and walked several blocks towards Granville Street and the downtown core. Near the transit station I stepped into a busy A&W and sat near the washrooms at the back. I repeated my door surveillance, but nobody I recognised from the Zheng Building or the coffee shop came in.
I relaxed and went up to the counter, where a pretty Filipino girl was serving. I gave her my best smile.
“Hi, I’m the guy who left the backpack.”
She looked at me blankly.
“For pick up.”
Light dawned. “Oh yes, the backpack.” She fished around under the counter at the side and produced it.
“Thanks,” I said. For a geek who spent hours every day in his garage, Charlie’s contacts were surprisingly widespread. He’d arranged with the manager of this place, who apparently owed him a major favour, to store my backpack here every day for the next few weeks. No questions asked.
I entered the washroom, took off the wig and glasses and changed into the casual clothes I’d brought in the shoulder bag. Ignoring the Filipino girl as I left, I walked to the nearest bus stop and took the Canada Line home.
As soon as I got in the door I called Emma on my new secure cell phone. The three of us each now had a prepaid phone with an anonymous number that couldn’t be traced back to us.
“I’m in,” I said.
“Have you seen the vault?” she asked.
“Yes.”
There was a pause. “Is it possible?”
I knew exactly what she was asking, and that she wanted a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Explanations would come later.
“Yes,” I replied, “I think it is.”
Another little pause. “Good, you made the right decision then.”
“Yup, the house would be slim pickings compared to this place.”
“It would be easier though. Less risk for you.”
We’d gone over this before. “He might be expecting something like that. This he will never expect. That’s to my advantage.”
“OK. Just take care Mike. Let’s talk again soon.” Click.
I was okay with that. We’d agreed to keep our meetings, even our communications, to a minimum to avoid attracting Zheng’s attention as much as possible. It was essential that he didn’t know we were meeting regularly, and figure out that we were planning something.
I went to the fridge, took out an already-opened ten-dollar Argentinean white, and poured a glassful. The first few sips were glorious, the chilled, piquant wine an instant stress reliever. I sat at my desk for the next hour, drawing diagrams and making notes on unlined sheets of paper, until the wine was lukewarm and almost gone, and my plans made.
I looked them over and reluctantly fed every sheet into the little paper shredder on the floor beside my desk. Nothing I had come up with was any good.
We had to get past the building’s security and into the vault room, then into the vault, and then into the Zheng deposit boxes. At the moment, I didn’t have the faintest idea how to achieve any of those things.
12.
CASING THE JOINT
The next morning I filled my backpack and took the Canada Line downtown. This time I approached the Zheng Building from the side, and walked slowly past the underground garage entrance. It had the usual automatic barrier, a long piece of yellow and black wood stretched across the driveways in and out. In a small green hut, with windows on all sides, a garage attendant watched as building occupants swiped their card and triggered the barrier arm. I knew he was there during the day but not at night. Boylan had told me that any renters wanting in and out after hours had to swipe their card and open an automatic gate. This was just one of many things that I had still to investigate.
I strode past the crooked name sign on the concrete block and under the electronic eye that was watching me from above the automatic glass doors, and reminded myself that from here on I had to stay ‘in character’ at all times. Inside, the foyer security guard, identification badge clipped to the breast pocket of his jacket, paid me not the slightest attention. On my right was a wall of locked mailboxes, one of which had my office’s number on it, and straight ahead were the waist-high turnstiles through which everyone entering or leaving the building had to pass.
I swiped my tenant’s card in the slot and passed through. There was now an electronic record that identified me as having entered the building as this precise time. This sort of invasive measure fitted perfectly with Zheng’s obsessive-compulsive personality, something I looked forward to sending shock waves through in due course.
The security control room on my left was fronted by a huge plate glass window. I slowed as I passed it and peered inside using the periphery of my vision. Computer monitors displayed images from the plethora of internal cameras through which just about every hallway and open space in the building could be observed. Extrapolating from the number of cameras I’d noted so far, and using an average per floor of the building, I estimated there were about twenty internal cameras in all, plus at least two outside the building, over the front and garage entrances.
Past the security room, a corridor with marbled walls and recessed lighting held the building’s five elevators. I stepped into the first one and pressed the button for the twelfth floor. In the narrow hallway leading to my office I noted numerous scratches on the grimy, off-white walls, the sort created by careless workmen when moving office furniture. The contrast to the ground floor was startling.
Inside Room 1207 I could finally relax. There were no cameras here. I pulled off the wig and vigorously scratched my itchy head before flopping into the chair behind the desk. The room was depressing me already and it was where I would have to spend many hours of my time in the days ahead. It might arouse suspicion if my computerised pass records were checked and they showed that I spent precious little time in the building. My real work lay outside this drab office but I couldn’t spend hours every day wandering around the corridors. That really would arouse suspicion.
I thought about Volumes Books and Mr. Barnes. The day after getting beaten up I’d called him and resigned. He hadn’t seemed the least bit surprised. In fact, from the tone of his voice it was obvious that he was relieved, maybe even as overjoyed as I was. Of course, he pretended to be inconvenienced. You’ve put me in a very awkward position with this lack of due notice, Malone, blah, blah, blah . . .
Of course, this meant that I now had no income at all. Thankfully, Emma and Charlie were both still flush and were subsidising me, and this entire enterprise, until completion.
I took the day’s Vancouver Sun out of my briefcase and read everything of interest in it from first page to last. Crosswords or Sudoku had never interested me, so I ignored those. Afterwards I took out an A4 refill pad and wrote down everything I’d learned so far, drew some sketches and prepared a long ‘to do’ list. None of this stimulated any fresh ideas.
I reminded myself that it was early days yet and moved the chair over to the end window. The view was terrible, but it was better than staring at the wall.
*
The place was so poorly ventilated that I dropped off to sleep and awoke, bleary-eyed and stiff, a couple of hours later. I put the wig and glasses back on, examined my fa
ce in a small mirror I carried in the bag, and set off for the elevator where I pressed the button for Floor -2.
The bell pinged and the doors slid apart. I felt nervous down here, right in the belly of the beast, but the best way around that was to get to work. That meant keeping my eyes wide open, observing all relevant details and memorising them for recording later.
The first thing I’d noticed was that, of the five elevators, only three came down here to the bottom floor, the other two going no lower than the foyer. Of course, this included the one I had stepped into first, only to find that there weren’t any ‘-1’ or ‘-2’ buttons. I couldn’t think of any reason for this discrepancy, other than some vague concession to security, but all such construction idiosyncrasies had to be noted.
The only decoration on the walls of the small foyer in front of me was a framed diagram of the fire escape route, conveniently displaying a stairwell from the foyer that led down to this room. I quickly located it directly opposite the elevator doors. The hard tiles underfoot amplified each step I took as I approached the vault.
When the time came I’d wear soft-soled running shoes.
I stopped in front of the day gate and noted the intercom keypad and another keypad that activated the magnetic alarm beside the vault door. A steel pipe, no doubt containing electric cables, extended from above the magnet and vanished into the ceiling. None of these things looked ‘state of the art’ or even particularly new; they had probably been fitted at least a decade ago and never updated. That gave me a little hope.
I pressed the day gate intercom and waited. As this was the first time I’d done this alone I expected to have to go through a formal process of recognition, answer some questions into the intercom, maybe hold up my tenant’s pass card to the camera. The guards in the security room above wouldn’t let just anyone in.
The door in front of me clicked open.
I was surprised and pleased. Security in the building had obviously become routine over the years, to the point that anyone standing at the day gate was assumed to be a bona fide tenant of the building. That that sort of slackness had become ingrained was very, very good news indeed. It didn’t solve any of the technical challenges but it exposed the human element as vulnerable.
I took my time and examined the door jamb as I entered, looking for signs that it too was alarmed. Again, things looked good: it didn’t appear so. I couldn’t be absolutely sure and made a mental note to keep checking it on subsequent visits.
The door hissed closed behind me on its pneumatic hinges and I walked to my safe deposit box, number 1207, two thirds of the way down on the left hand wall. Boylan had given me a key for it yesterday, a kind I’d never seen before, with an individually numbered oval handle and a five centimetres long round shank, ending in a series of complex metal bits extending from opposite sides. My box, identical to all the others, had a horizontal slot for the key on the left side of the door. Three brass-coloured knobs, each with the twenty-six letters of the alphabet around its dial, were aligned to the right of the keyhole.
I dialled my three-letter code, E-M-A, inserted the key and turned it clockwise. A brass deadbolt inside the lock retracted from its slot in the door jamb and the door swung open on its internal hinges. I opened and closed the lock a few times, keeping the door open, and noted that the deadbolt was about two and a half centimetres long, five centimetres tall, and a centimetre or so thick. I filed another mental note to take exact measurements later and decided I’d done enough on my first solo visit.
On the way back up I met Boylan in the elevator. We nodded acknowledgement to each other and I wondered if I should say something. But reading the vacant expression on his face told me that he’d probably forgotten my name already, which was all to the good. It meant that he’d soon forget the rest of the details I’d told him about myself.
Back in the office I transcribed my mental notes while they remained fresh in my mind. So far everything had gone better than anticipated. I had infiltrated Zheng’s headquarters without suspicion, had access to the vault during working hours, and access to most of the rest of the building whenever I liked.
An outline of a plan was already beginning to form in my mind. There were two ways into the building, the front and garage doors, but the latter was the only one used by tenants after regular hours. So that’s how we’d do it. We’d still have to dodge video surveillance, enter the locked building without being detected, and sidestep the night-time security guard. And that would be the ‘easy’ part. We’d then still have to somehow penetrate the gigantic vault door and day gate, bypass the light and motion detectors, crack open a hundred safe deposit boxes and make off with as much of their contents as we could carry. All this without alerting the security guard or exposing ourselves to identification on the battery of closed circuit TV cameras.
Not exactly a walk in the park. But a few ideas were slipping into place and, now that I was in, I found the challenge of the heist itself tremendously exciting. When I’d stood inside the vault I could almost feel the adrenaline surging through me.
I’d figure the rest out eventually.
*
I showed my safe deposit box key to Charlie that night.
“Can you make a master key out of it?” I asked.
He put on a pair of little wire glasses and peered down his nose so closely at the key that I thought he was about to bite it.
“Nope,” he concluded.
“Care to elaborate?” I said, when nothing more was forthcoming from his lips.
“It’s a complicated key,” he said. “If I touch it with a file it will stop working altogether. It’s not the key to the mop cupboard you know.”
“OK, so any other suggestions?”
He shook his head. “Not really, but we can forget about making a master key. It will have to be some other way.”
I thought for a minute. “The keyhole goes all the way through. Maybe that’s a vulnerability.”
“Howdya mean?”
“It goes right through and out the other side.”
“So?”
“Well . . . that could be our way into the boxes, couldn’t it?”
Charlie looked puzzled. “You want to squirt acid into them or something? I guess it would ruin paper bills and bonds and stuff but it won’t affect diamonds. More to the point, it won’t get us access to them.”
I leaned forward, excited by where my thoughts were leading. “I’m thinking more along these lines: could we make some kind of lever, one that would go right through the keyhole?”
“How would that work?”
“Like this.” I mimed the action in the air with my hands. “We insert a slim cylindrical lever, which opens out two prongs on the far side to secure it. It’s attached to a mechanism clamped tight to the door. When we turn a handle it increases pressure until the bolt in the door gets pulled right out.”
Deep furrows creased Charlie’s forehead. “Sounds complicated,” he said. “Would take one hell of a strong device to do it.” Then a grin slowly appeared.
“I’ll start working on it in the morning.”
13.
MAN PURSE
I felt ridiculous carrying the thing. It was quite heavy too, due to all the electronic gadgetry that Charlie had crammed into it. I’d told him all I wanted was a video camera that could record a clear, sharp image, and go on doing so for several hours if necessary. He mustn’t even have heard me.
It was the first time in my life that I’d carried a man purse, and probably the last. I smiled vaguely in the direction of a burly businessman as he waddled past me, careful not to meet his eyes. My fellow tenants must have no reason to remember me; I had to be as drab and anonymous as possible.
The strap cut into my shoulder as I swung the little black leather satchel around, trying to make it seem as if it was light, with only documents or maybe an iPad inside. It had a wide bottom and a handle on top – as I said, a stupid man purse – and I had to keep one hand on the handl
e to point the hidden camera in the right direction. The tiny hole in the side was barely noticeable even when you knew it was there. A minor masterpiece of Charlie construction.
I roamed the building and filmed security features, as planned, before retiring to my office on the twelfth floor. The office was a bare as it was when I had walked into it for the first time three days earlier. Not much point in furnishing it, especially as everything in the room would eventually have to be wiped clean of fingerprints. I tootled around on my iPod for a while, then rested my head on my folded arms on top of the desk and dozed for a couple of hours. It was a long day, but I didn’t have to stay for all of it – a ‘wholesaler’ like me could be expected to pop in and out of the building at irregular times.
I left mid afternoon and got to Charlie’s house at five to four. I’d texted ahead and he was waiting for me at the front door. He grabbed the bag without even saying ‘Hello’ and disappeared with it into another room that he wouldn’t let me enter. I sipped tap water from a well-rinsed tumbler in the kitchen and waited.
I guess I dozed off again, due to the stress or whatever. The next thing I knew he was standing scowling over me, waving the small video camera in my face.
“Useless!” His mouth opened and closed silently a few times, as if words were literally failing him.
“What’s up, Chuck?” I ventured, deciding to pour fuel on his fire. Charlie hated being called Chuck.
“The film you took, it’s useless,” he spluttered, “Can’t see a thing.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“You useless turd, you spent two hours videotaping the walls and ceiling. If you want to get the security stuff, you have to point the camera at them first.”
“Didn’t I?”
By now he was well and truly beetroot-faced. “Haven’t I just said that? And not only did you point it wrong, you bounced up and down the whole time too. Having a little jig were you? Maybe you had to do the fucking pee-pee dance?”
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