“What happens if Verrazano is successful?” Bruni asked. None of his officers had spoken yet, not even to ask a question. Danzig figured they knew this little banter was about a lot more than sharing an informant’s name, and they weren’t about to get in the middle of it.
“On the off chance that LeGrande and Verrazano actually manage to sell the diamonds, in their entirety, and escape, the answer is obvious. If they are arrested during the commission, it will most likely be the FBI or US Customs that makes the collar. In that case, we have ways of getting those diamonds released here for this operation.”
“You can do that?”
“LeGrande is an American citizen, and he doesn’t have enough years left in his life to take a third stint in prison. I can get him to cooperate. In short, I can do any goddamned thing I want.”
Bruni studied her for a string of long, silent breaths. Then he nodded slowly.
“I don’t know,” he said heavily. “It seems we’re putting our hopes on whether one group of smugglers is good enough to sell the diamonds on the black market. Or on another set of hopes that we could set up an elaborate sting operation that still requires you to catch the smugglers in your country,” he made an elaborate motion with his hand, “and then bring them back to our country.” He mimicked that sweeping gesture with his other hand. “I think maybe it’s time to fold this up. As you say, the diamonds are no longer in this country. I think, perhaps, our partnership has come to an end. We can focus on the bank. I think we’ve got more than enough there for an arrest.”
“But can you get a conviction?” Danzig challenged.
“That’s my problem,” Bruni said dismissively.
The meeting concluded quickly after that. Bruni dismissed his men and then bid good day to Choi and Danzig, in that order. Danzig stopped him in the hallway.
“You’re making a big gamble,” she said. “You’d better hope you’re right.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I doubt that, actually,” she said. “Your government asked the FBI to step in and my team specifically, because of the experience we had with Salvatore Cannizzaro and his operations at the Commerce Bank. You’re months away from being able to make an arrest there without our help. There was also the matter of some fairly widespread corruption among Italy’s law enforcement and your branch specifically.” Danzig knew on a level that she should proceed with caution, Bruni had a fragile ego, wasn’t used to being challenged by a woman, and was under a lot of pressure from his superiors. But he’d also obstructed her at every turn, and playing politics so far hadn’t netted them any better results. “The FBI is here because the Italian government doesn’t want to be embarrassed by Cannizzaro. Again. So, you can push back here and make a good show for your troops, but you know damn well you can’t push that shit uphill. And until I am confident that the identity of my informant is going to stay safe, I’m not handing him over to you.”
“I hope you’re right about Verrazano and LeGrande. It would be unfortunate if a thief outmaneuvered you again.”
Bruni turned crisply on his heels and stalked off. Danzig said nothing, just listened to the sounds of Bruni’s heels clacking on the tile.
“Well, that was fun,” Choi quipped.
“Prick,” Danzig said to the empty hall.
They turned and started walking in the opposite direction, making for the exit. This was a massive building, and it was about a ten-minute walk to their car, all told.
“I don’t want to be forced to give them Mazza, because that would be everything they need to move on the bank and forget about the diamonds,” she said, keeping her voice low. “Regardless of what Bruni said back there, it’d be hard for them to roll that up with him.”
“I’m not sure how much longer we can keep this up, though,” Choi said. Choi came to the Bureau after serving six years as an Army special forces officer. His next six years in the Bureau was with their elite Hostage Rescue Team, the FBI’s equivalent to the Army’s Delta Force. He was two years off of that when Danzig met him here in Rome, was immediately impressed, and when she learned that the Bureau was giving her a squad to catch gem smugglers, Choi was her first call. “We haven’t really had a chance to talk about the LeGrande-Verrazano angle yet,” he said. They’d only learned about it the night before. “You don’t really think that play with arresting LeGrande and then using that as a sting to get Cannizzaro is an option, though, do you?”
“I think it’s an option, Dan. I never claimed it was an ideal one.” She stopped walking, turned, and faced him. They were in a long, wide hallway. The wall behind her was a row of windows above shoulder height on the building’s western side. “Bruni isn’t going to pull the plug on this thing, and he’d have a fun time explaining to his superiors here that they let Verrazano slip out of the country with six pounds of diamonds.”
“I know,” Choi said, “but scoring points in an argument doesn’t give us Cannizzaro, and it doesn’t get us Sokolov.”
Danzig nodded. They made their way out of the building and into the late morning air, warm, dry, and bright. A seven-foot concrete wall surrounded the building with another seven feet of metal mesh fencing above that. Their car was on the other side. They were quiet as they made their way through the security checkpoint and to the car. “Job one is to figure out whether anyone at the Bureau is working a smuggling case.” Those were long odds. Unless this serendipitously fell into someone’s lap, because of how quickly this came together, those diamonds could be sold long before anyone in law enforcement even knew about it.
“I think we need to press Mazza a little harder,” Choi said. “He’s got to kick us something or we kick him loose. Let him think that, at any rate. He needs to figure out what’s going on back home. There’s still the problem of even if they’re successful…” Choi let his voice trail off; nothing more needed to be said. These were mafia heavies, not skilled smugglers. Getting stones was one thing, but sneaking them across international borders was another. That explained why Cannizzaro made up with his cousin. His shipping operation didn’t extend to the United States, and anyway, that would take too long. Bartolo was his only real hope of getting those diamonds back.
A plan was starting to form in Danzig’s mind, but she wasn’t ready to put it to words yet. It was either an incredibly bold move that would nab them a Russian crime lord or the kind of thing Wile E. Coyote would concoct to snare the Road Runner, and she wasn’t sure on what side of that line it fell yet. All she knew was that if those diamonds didn’t get back to Italy and into Salvatore Cannizzaro’s possession by the date that he’d promised them, Sokolov would slip right through their fingers.
20
They silently packed their things, giving each item and each article of clothing a once-over. The computers were password locked, but Rusty would check them later. Toiletries, anything that would come into contact with the body were disposed off. They were out of the room in under ten minutes. Jack checked out of the suite, explaining to the front desk manager that their plans had changed. The manager needlessly apologized that the universe had placed an imposition on his guest but thanked them for their stay. By the time the valet brought the BMW around, Rusty already booked them an executive suite at the InterContinental a few blocks away.
“The InterContinental?” Jack asked as he accepted the keys from the valet and climbed into the vehicle.
“Seemed appropriate,” Rusty noted wryly.
Jack pulled away from the Ritz and headed toward Wilshire. Jack had never gotten the appeal of Sports Activity Coupes. They always seemed to him to be a weird hybrid of an SUV and a sports car, but he had to admit that the M-series X6 was a hell of a lot of fun to drive. Even in LA traffic.
They checked in to their suite and set about getting reorganized. Rusty checked the computers first and found no evidence of tampering. They thought the probability that the computers could be tampered with was low, but they would take no chances.
If they’d been on the fence ab
out believing Vito before, they all believed that he’d been setting them up now. Vito probably wanted them to think and therefore plan on his and Reginald’s departure from Los Angeles as much as he wanted them out of the room so Reginald could do whatever it was he intended there. Planting a listening device most likely, but they hadn’t ruled out something more dangerous, which was why they offloaded anything that would come in contact with their bodies. Now they had a game of bluff to play.
If Reginald had planted a bug, or worse, a camera, in their room at the Ritz, he’d know they’d checked out. But Jack still had to tell Vito that they were in on his plan to double-cross Reginald and steal the diamonds from him. Vito would know they were bluffing.
It was always possible that the glass was tipped over by some other means, but they wouldn’t chance that.
Jack called Vito and said they were in. Difficult to gauge reactions over the phone, but Jack couldn’t tell one way or the other if Vito bought it. He just said that he’d call Jack as soon as he had the flight information.
The next morning, Jack called WorldSecure.
“Good morning, this is Agent Hoskins with US Customs. I’m the aviation liaison officer at Van Nuys Airport.”
“Hello, sir. How can we help you today?”
Jack gave the practiced, perfunctory laugh of bureaucrats the world over. “Paperwork, man. You know how it is.”
“You bet I do. Shoot.”
“We tracking a shipment from one of your clients, and I have to reconfirm it. It’s been confirmed once already, but there’s this new process says we gotta do it twice. It’s supposed to be moving out of here tomorrow. I’m showing a declared value of,” Jack flipped a few pages in his notebook as if he were looking it up, “of seventy-three million.”
“Okay, what’s the name on the shipment, sir? Who is the account holder?”
“Reginald Burton.”
Jack heard typing on the other end of the line. “I’m sorry, Agent Hoskins, was it? I am showing a dispatch order and the declared value of seventy-three million, which we have to disclose for insurance purposes. But this is showing a local delivery. It’s an address in Inglewood. Says here, ‘Pan Pacific Metallurgy and Minerals.’ Business type is listed as an importer-exporter.”
Jack copied down the address onto his notepad and then looked it up on his laptop. The location was an office park at the southwest corner of the 105 and 405 interchange, just outside LAX. If they were an importer-exporter, that would be a perfect location for their offices.
“Hmm,” Jack said, “maybe they’ve changed plans and have decided to move from LAX instead of Van Nuys.”
“Looks like it, sir.”
Jack sighed into the phone, the tired and overlooked cog in the wheel. “Obviously, I’m always the last to know. Thanks a lot for your time.”
Jack hung up. He got up and refilled his coffee cup from the pot room service had brought up. “So, Vito was lying.”
Enzo said, “That guy needs one of those ‘days since safety incident’ signs, only for bullshit.” No one laughed, because they were all thinking the same thing.
Jack filled them in on the details of the phone call. “Looks like the Singapore thing was a red herring. Assuming they don’t know that we checked out of the Ritz, they probably believe that we’re planning on that and therefore are focusing our efforts on getting in as ground crew at Van Nuys. They’ll believe we’re sidelined and will only be planning on Bartolo’s crew.”
“Who will not be as organized,” Enzo said.
“Exactly. So, first up, Rusty, we need to get everything we can on this Pan Pacific Metallurgy.”
“Already on it,” he said.
“Next up, let’s go do some recon. Enzo, you can roll with me. Grab some notebooks, your computer, and a Wi-Fi brick.”
“Take this one,” Rusty said and held up a small hot spot. “I had this one with me in the Beemer last night in Santa Monica, so it wasn’t in the room.” That was smart. If Reginald had been in the room, he could have copied down the IP information for any of their Wi-Fi devices left there.
Jack and Enzo had done an armored car job before, but it had been about twenty-five years ago, and it wasn’t as though Turin in the nineties was doing state-of-the-art security. The Fiat payroll job was one for the record books, though, and that’s what got him in solid with Niccoló Bartolo and the School of Turin. While they weren’t planning to intercept the car en route from WorldSecure to Pan Pacific, knowing how long that drive would take was important. They also needed to know the possible alternate routes, in case of an accident or construction. Jack guessed the sale would be between the core business hours of ten and two, so they timed the route to start by rolling past WorldSecure just before ten thirty that morning. Jack took Hill Street to the 110 southbound, just south of the USC campus, and followed that crawl to the 105, which he followed practically to LAX, exiting at Imperial and going through a rather involved turnaround to head into the office park. Enzo timed it at forty-two minutes, fifty seconds. Jack kept his speed at a conservative rate, going slightly slower than the flow of traffic, trying to match what he thought the armored car’s pace would be.
Pan Pacific’s proximity to the 405 and 105 freeways was nearly a perfect setup. While the plan didn’t call for a rapid getaway, the need for one was always a possibility. Being so close to not one but two freeways as well as one of Los Angeles’s major north-south arteries, La Cienega Boulevard, gave them multiple potential escape routes and would force any pursuers to either split up or guess correctly if they didn’t have eyes on them at all times.
The office park was three buildings arranged in a circle around a roundabout and water fountain. The buildings were all four stories of white exterior and square-shaped blue-green windows arranged in a grid. The buildings were slightly curved so as to follow the contours of the circle, as though they were forming the outer rings of a larger one.
Jack rolled down the long entry road. It was lined with palms on either side, sidewalks and then raised berms with low hedges between the trees. This created a chokepoint; it was the only road in or out of the complex, and the landscaping would prohibit someone from jumping the curb and escaping. Enzo noted that as they drove down it, and Jack confirmed that he was thinking the same thing. He took one pass around the roundabout.
“It’s that middle one,” Enzo said, referring to the building.
There was an access road between each of the buildings and a small number of reserved parking spaces.
“The armored car is going to stop right here,” Jack said, rolling slowly past the building. Normally, they’d have gotten out and done recon on foot, but these were relatively new constructions and would almost certainly have security cameras. That footage would be turned over to law enforcement as soon as WorldSecure realized the diamonds were stolen. The police or, more likely, the FBI would review the footage from the previous days to see if anyone was casing the location, just as Jack and Enzo were doing now. They’d sprayed the license plates with a camera blocker so that wouldn’t show up either, but they weren’t getting out of the vehicle.
Jack did one more turn around the traffic circle with Enzo filming on his camera. As he completed his second pass, instead of turning back down the main road, Jack turned right onto the access road between the target building and the one next to it. The access roads all led to a series of parking lots that ringed the buildings. The lots were separated by a similar landscaping scheme as the entry road, palm trees and hedges atop raised sidewalks. Jack drove the length of the lot’s outer perimeter, confirming what he’d thought on the way in. That main road was the only way in or out. The BMW did have the ground clearance to hop over the curb, but there looked to be a low concrete wall on the far side of it, which separated the parking lot from the residential neighborhood on the other side.
“It’s not long from the building to La Cienega, maybe forty-five seconds at full speed,” Jack said. “But it’s a half mile in either directi
on to get onto the freeway, if it comes to that. Look closer on the map.”
“Your cops aren’t lazy like ours are, so I don’t know how quickly they’d respond,” Enzo said.
“The real hole in this is if the guards don’t turn over the diamonds until they call the warrant in. Then we’re stuck and in a position to take it by force, which is where the egress calculation comes in. The other variable is whether Reginald and Vito are with them.”
“In the car?”
“No, they won’t be allowed to ride in the armored car, but it’s very likely that they would be arriving at the same time or close to it. You can even imagine a scenario where Reginald is waiting out front and wants to walk it in.”
“Yeah,” Enzo agreed. “That feels like him. Since either of them can identify at least two of us, we can’t use someone to run a distraction. Not without a disguise.”
“We’ve done that before. Rusty has too, I think.”
It was a flaw and a very real one. No plan was perfect, but they planned jobs months in advance, rehearsed every detail, every contingency. This was being done with just days to plan and almost no logistical support. If Reginald and Vito rolled with the armored car, the bluff they planned wouldn’t work, and there would only be one recourse. And that was an option Jack wasn’t willing to take. He wouldn’t, but could he say the same about both of his partners? Jack had only shot another person once before. It was in self-defense. And his friend, a bent Italian cop, covered it up.
Once a Thief (Gentleman Jack Burdette Book 3) Page 20