“Bring down a bad man who used me. Get rich doing it. Plus your other reason.”
“My other reason? What’s that?”
“A chance to redeem ourselves.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Was she right? Was that what this whole crazy venture was all about? Redeeming myself?
“You still have to vote, Mike. How’s it going to be?”
I swirled the remaining Cabernet in my glass. My mind was buzzing. Maybe she was right about the redemption thing. Finally I said, “We could use a third pair of hands.”
She sat back, seemingly content at my answer. For a while we just sat there. My eyes travelled over her again, as they had many times throughout the evening. Over the slim, honey-brown limbs, over the perfect collar bones that held me strangely captivated, over the smooth, perfect division of her breasts above the classic ‘little black dress’ she was wearing. Above all, over the beautiful face with the upturned nose, grey-green eyes and long blonde tresses. I was captivated by her, sinking in her depths, and happy to drown.
She sighed gently. “Thank you, Mike. From what you’ve told me, everything’s good so far.”
“It is good,” I replied. Suddenly we were businesslike again. “There’s still some stuff I have to work out, but it shouldn’t take long. Then we do the job, get out of the country quickly, and live happily ever after. On that tropical island you always wanted.”
She leaned forward, her expression serious. “That’ll be nice. And being free of him will be nicer still. But I meant what I said before, Mike, it’s no longer about money for me.”
“It’s really about redemption?”
She stretched out a slim arm and took my hands in hers. “It’s about finally fixing an old mistake. It’s about being with you.”
It was what I had wanted to hear for the last ten years and it made me incredibly happy. I didn’t know what to say, so just kept looking at her as we left the restaurant. We held hands like teenagers as we descended in the cable car down to the car park, only letting go of each other to get into her car.
She started the engine and drove off. I glanced in the passenger side mirror out of habit. Even with my head fuzzy with wine I still noticed another vehicle pulling out of the car park behind us. I told myself not to be paranoid and looked elsewhere. It followed behind us down the steeply descending road, and I peered into the right-side mirror and tried to make it out. It was black, but then all cars looked black at this time of night. Emma noticed my change in mood and asked if anything was wrong. I assured her I was fine and made an effort to forget about the vehicle behind. Maybe not a very good one.
“You think someone’s following us?” she asked.
Damn, there was no fooling her. “It’s nothing; everyone going home from Grouse has to come down this road,” I replied.
She smiled. “That’s what I think too.”
Good, I’d convinced her. Now I just had to convince myself. I itched to check the mirror again, but forced myself not to; at the bottom of the hill we went through traffic lights and Emma glanced at me.
“That car’s turned left,” she said.
*
The elevator doors closed and I looked at my watch. It was coming up to ten o’clock already and so far I hadn’t done very well this morning. Last night I’d gone to bed with the intention of getting up early and being at the vault when Jeff D. came down to open it at seven a.m. My alarm had duly sounded at a quarter to six, but I’d turned it off while still only half awake, rolled over and gone back to sleep. So much for getting another look at the opening procedure.
I went into the vault foyer and stared at the vault door, now opened wide. Fortunately, it wasn’t completely back against the wall: the policy was to open it about one hundred and ten degrees, leaving lots of room for tenants to walk in and out. I ambled around the giant circle of gleaming steel and took a look at the front of the door. By now I was no longer afraid of being challenged for such things – the guards at the video monitors never seemed to pay any attention to my vagaries of behaviour. If one of them noticed my latest perambulation and bothered to come down, I had an excuse ready anyway: I wanted to check the manufacturer’s name so that I could recommend the facilities to one of my diamond-dealing colleagues. That sort of flimsy explanation would have aroused concern in other places, but no-one here seemed the suspicious sort.
Charlie had already taken several stills from my covert video of the door, enlarged them, and we’d studied the magnetic alarm in close-up detail. It was such a simple thing, just a bloody magnet for God’s sake, so there must be a way around it, right? So far, we hadn’t found one.
It consisted of an elongated rectangular metal box, divided in two matching halves each about thirty centimetres long and ten centimetres wide. The first half was bolted horizontally to the edge of the door at the upper right side. The second half, which I couldn’t see right now, and which according to Charlie was called ‘the receiver’, was attached high up on the doorframe in a matching position. When the vault door was closed, both these pieces aligned perfectly side by side.
A flexible steel pipe led from the top of the receiver up to a box in the ceiling and, presumably, contained the mechanism’s wiring. Charlie had given this pipe a lot of attention, but I’d insisted he was wasting his time – after all, any tampering with the wiring would itself set off the alarm.
A keypad on the wall beneath the receiver had also fascinated Charlie for a long time. It armed and disarmed all the alarms inside the vault as well as the magnetic alarm on the door.
“We need the keypad code,” he’d insisted.
“No good,” I’d replied, “Even if we got it, it’d be just as useless as your cutting the wires idea. Switching the alarms off during the night or weekend alerts the security company automatically and the cops come down on our heads pronto.”
“OK, OK. That means the magnets need to stay together too. So how the hell do we get in?”
I hadn’t had an answer to that and still didn’t. The magnets had to stay together to keep the alarm quiet, but they had to come apart to let us get into the vault. As I said, simple, ingenious, and seemingly impossible to circumvent.
Worse still, time was running out. I already had a preferred date for the heist – Labour Day weekend, which would give us an extra day to tidy up our traces and leave the country. There had to be a way over this final hurdle.
I looked at the magnet on the door and prayed for an idea to come to me.
There has to be a way . . .
The magnet stared right back at me and I realised I had to go. I couldn’t stay here for longer than a minute or two or a guard really would stir himself to come down and talk to the eccentric Mr. Robie who was always absentmindedly wandering around.
I turned away, head bowed, the image of the twin magnets imprinted on my mind.
Then I heard a voice and all thoughts of alarm devices instantly vanished.
It was a Chinese voice. Zheng’s voice.
*
Theoretically, I’d known this could happen. It was Zheng’s building and half the safe deposit boxes were solely for use by his company. It would not be unusual for him to visit his own vault from time to time; in fact, it was pretty much a given. I’d gone over in my head what I might do if I was in the vault when Zheng arrived. To be honest, I hadn’t really come up with any answers to that, beyond keeping my back to him, not looking in his direction, and leaving at the first opportunity. In reality, I had hoped the situation would never arise. Now it had.
I was trapped where I was and daren’t move. If I came out, Zheng would instantly want to know why one of his tenants was lurking behind the door. He’d take a good long look at me and it would be enough to seal my doom. The blond wig and the big black-framed glasses might be good enough to fool him at a glance, but they were wildly insufficient for close-up inspection by someone who had met me before. Security would be called, then the police, then investigations would ensue and I�
��d be looking at criminal charges.
I stood perfectly still, legs tight together, hoping the bottom of the door would hide my feet from view. I could hear him taking his time, talking to someone as he approached, but I couldn’t make out many of the words. He stopped right in front of the vault door and said something about ‘occupancy’.
“Two more offices leased this month.” It was Boylan’s voice.
“Any security issues?” Zheng was hardly more than the thickness of the door away; for one terrible moment I thought he was taunting me. Beads of sweat trickled down my forehead and into my eyes. I blinked them away and kept my hands still, barely breathing.
“Nothing at all. Davenport recommends we upgrade the box doors. I told him I’d pass it on.”
“Leave it,” Zheng replied, “No-one would ever get that far.”
“That’s what I think too, sir.”
“Good. It’s just make-work for him.”
A rivulet of liquid fear wended its way down my back. Any more of this and Zheng would detect me by smell alone.
“You can leave me now.”
“Very good, Mr Zheng.”
There was a familiar buzz as the day gate was unlocked from above. Zheng entering the vault.
An elevator pinged and its doors opened and shut. Boylan leaving.
I made myself count to ten before I tiptoed around the door and walked quickly to the second elevator. My footsteps seemed to echo loudly on the tiled floor, but I dared not look back.
At the elevator I pressed the call button and stood in front of the gunmetal doors, willing them to open. At any moment I expected to feel a tap on the shoulder. At last the familiar ping sounded and the doors slid apart.
I found myself staring straight into the cold grey eyes of an all too familiar human gorilla: Zheng’s chauffeur Wark.
I froze in an instinctive paralysis of terror. Wark’s eyes took me in, never flickering. I was certain he was examining my black-framed, Clark Kent style glasses and the short blonde men’s wig that was forever making my scalp itch. No doubt he was laughing inside, astonished that I’d thought such a flimsy disguise could ever fool anyone. I wondered where his first punch would land and how many broken bones I’d have before the cops came.
Instead all he did was scowl at me. Only then did I realise that I was standing in his way. But I was still unable to make myself move. After an eternity of seconds he shrugged his broad, muscular shoulders and stepped around me. Somehow I was able to totter into the elevator without collapsing in a heap.
When the elevator car began ascending I closed my eyes and laid my forehead against the cool, hard door. On the twelfth floor I rushed to my office and collapsed in a sweat-sodden heap behind the desk.
*
I peeled off my clinging shirt and downed a bottle of Premium Springs water in one long drink. It was warm from being in my briefcase, but it rehydrated me and kept me from fainting in the stuffy room.
For a while I feared a knock at my door, signalling that it was all over. If Zheng had seen me leave the vault foyer . . . if Wark had recognised me . . . No knock came, but I remained agitated and jumpy, unable to settle down and calm myself. My eyes flicked to the door and back, to the door and back, my mouth dry again, heartbeat racing . . .
Even though I’d negotiated the danger well enough in the end, I couldn’t get the thought of Zheng out of my head for ages. There seemed to be more things spooking me every day. I thought about last night, a beautiful evening nearly ruined by my reaction to the car behind us as we drove home. It had turned out to be nothing, but it made me realise how much this heist had changed me. I was paying a heavy price for my meticulous approach to planning and preparation. It might assure success – so I hoped and prayed – but it slowed things down considerably. For weeks I’d been living under the greatest stress of my life. Up until now I’d told myself to go slow, prepare and be vigilant. Now I saw that I had to hurry things up. The sooner this was over, the sooner I could become a normal human being again.
Which meant that it was time to get to work on the alarm.
Some guys mentally undress attractive women. I do it with alarms. The slim rectangular magnets in their smooth, shiny steel casings. The huge hexagonal bolts screwed deep into each corner holding it in place. The flow of magnetic current uniting the separate, but complimentary, halves. It was almost sexual.
The bolts. They were probably locked in place on the inside and therefore impossible to unscrew. But even if they weren’t, what good would that do me? Unscrew them and, yet again, the alarm would be triggered.
But . . . there was something there, some little worm wiggling at the back of my mind.
It was driving me crazy. I sketched a diagram of the magnetic alarm and listed its separate parts. I added a note stressing the necessity of a continuous flow of magnetic current. I put a question mark next to the hex bolts. In my mind I ran through a scenario of unscrewing them and dismantling the magnets from the door and jamb. But none of it did any good. Every which way, the alarm still triggered. The cops still came. I got arrested.
The only good thing about the device was that it was on the outside rather than the inside. It would have been more logical to have it on the inner side of the door. That would have made it truly impossible to tamper with; it would have been ‘game over’ and I could have packed up and gone home. Because it was on the outside, I was willing to bet that the magnetic alarm had been installed after the vault construction had been completed, as an additional layer of security.
I liked places with security additions applied piecemeal and ad hoc – that situation had served me well before, when Emma and I had done the warehouse heist. It should be serving me well again. But this time it didn’t seem to make any difference.
The worm at the back of my head wiggled again and this time I managed to hold on to it. The hex bolts . . . maintaining an unbroken magnetic field . . . simplicity . . . I screwed my eyes up and pulled at the worm.
And it came out. The way to beat this simple, highly effective device was with something similarly simple and effective.
What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. I shook my head gently from side to side and wondered why it had taken me so long to figure it out.
19.
DOORS AND LOCKS
“It’s the elegant way, but are you sure you can do it?”
“It’s a basic skill for anyone in my line of business,’ Charlie replied huffily.
We’d just finished a successful light detector masking trial in his malodorous bedroom, and the black electrical tape had worked a treat. With this piece of the puzzle sorted out we’d moved to the kitchen and to the subject of locked doors. I’d listed the ones we needed to pick: the door accessing the building from the underground garage, the door to the security room between the foyer and the elevators, and the door to the vault-level storage closet where the vault key was stored. They would be locked on the night of the heist and picking them would be the cleanest, quickest, least dangerous way through all three.
“If you don’t think I can pick a simple lock,” Charlie continued, “Then why ask me to help you do this?”
I could tell that some pacification was in order.
“OK, I agree. I’m just making sure,” I said. “I’ve been rehearsing my own role over and over again in my head, so don’t get short with me if I go over yours a few times too. We only get one chance at this.”
“Look, I’ll show you,” Charlie said. He went inside and returned a minute later with his hands full. He sat opposite me and I leaned over for a better view.
“This is an Allen wrench,” he explained, holding out a thin piece of metal.
“I’ve seen them in IKEA.”
“You have, but this is a real one. They come in different sizes.” He put it down and picked up another tool. “And this is called an L-shaped torque wrench.”
“It looks like a fancier version of the same thing.”
“Basically, yes. With these two handy gizmos, plus a few metal picks with serrated teeth, I can open just about any standard door lock in the world.”
“How?” I needed to know for sure that he could do it.
Charlie grimaced and I knew I’d annoyed him again. I felt like I’d just asked a magician to reveal his secrets.
“It’s called raking,” he said. “I bung the torque wrench into the bottom of the keyhole and apply pressure. Above it I insert a pick with serrated teeth – ‘peaks’ they’re called in the trade – and drag it over the pins of the lock at the very back of the keyhole.”
“Like a pianist running his fingers across ivory keys,” I said, trying to flatter him.
He thought about that for a moment. “Sort of,” he replied, “Though a lot less posh. Anyway, the pins set one by one and when they’re all in place – Voilà! – the door opens.”
“How long does it take you?”
“Varies. Every lock is different. It usually takes several rakes to set all the pins, but that’s still a lot quicker than the namby-pamby stuff with dentist’s tools you see on TV.”
“That’s great, but is there any way to make it even faster?”
“Sure, I can do a master key ahead of time. I’m working on one for the garage door into the building.”
“How does that work?”
“I know the type of key it takes so I use one of those as the basis, plus an Allen wrench to make a rake.”
I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about, but it sounded like he knew what he was doing and I’d seen him open a lot of types of lock lying around on his garage work bench. As far as I was concerned, it was another part of the puzzle completed. Only a few more to go and I’d be ready.
“Sounds good, Charlie. Now, how is the deposit box opener coming along?”
“Come to the garage and find out,” he said.
He led me across his cluttered back yard, circumnavigating various objets d’art placed randomly like a bizarre obstacle course. I kept my eyes glued to the grass to avoid tripping over old bricks or treading on the occasional two by fours with rusty nails sticking out of them. Charlie yanked open a corrugated iron door and led me into the saturnine depths of his man cave.
Meaner Things Page 18