Thief's Odyssey

by John L. Monk

  Ever since that cabbie mentioned it, my mind had returned again and again to that $25,000-a-night suite. Rich, famous and beautiful, Isabella fit perfectly with the celebrity architecture she’d chosen to fall unconscious in every night. As far as I was concerned, anyone who stayed in a place like that was basically screaming, “Hey you, look how rich I am!”

  Entertainment types did a lot of dumb things, like wear gobs of gold and diamonds in public and have their pictures taken. In Isabella’s case, De Beers diamonds—big fat ones I’d have to sit on until I found a jeweler I could trust more than Scott Horton.

  For the second time since my arrival, I wondered if I should abandon the Danny Fleer job. Compared to this, he was small time. The Poseidon could be my biggest score yet. My ticket to the big leagues, right up there with Blane Nordahl the silver thief, aka “Burglar to the Stars.”

  Well, that did it. Between a nibble of bacon and a swish of juice, I’d made up my mind to rob Isabella Rhodes. Deciding to do it was easy enough. Doing it successfully and not getting caught meant mapping the Poseidon Hotel’s security and testing how carefully they adhered to it. Joining the ranks of famous thieves would be nice—but not too soon. Maybe in fifty years, in a memoir.

  “Will you be needing anything else, sir?” Donald, my waiter, said. I’d seen him with other guests—he was nice to everyone, but he had a way of singling you out as special.

  “Funny you ask,” I said. “I have a question.”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “What do you know about Isabella Rhodes, the singer?”

  Donald smiled and the world smiled with him.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “She is a lovely girl. Would you like me to adjust the volume, sir?”

  I stared at him, uncomprehending, then realized what he meant.

  “Oh, the music? That’s her singing?”

  Now that I listened for it, I noticed a trendy-sounding pop song I’d heard several times since arriving at the airport. Rhythmic and bouncy, I’d caught myself tapping my feet to it more than a few times.

  “Yes, sir. She’s from this island, in fact. I’ve met her. Very nice lady and very beautiful. She’s also a supermodel. You can see her at the Poseidon next week if you are still here.”

  I smiled. “So you’re saying I have a chance with her?”

  Donald threw back his head and laughed. “How long will you be staying, sir?”

  “Weekend after next.”

  “Well then, you should have plenty of time to get started. Before she gets away, you know?”

  I paid for my meal and tipped him my last American twenty. He was good at his job. Then I crossed the street to the Poseidon and asked whether they had any rooms available. They did. The lady at the desk showed me a map, and that gave me the seed of an idea.

  After asking a few questions, I ended up choosing a “Grand Suite,” close to the right-side tower, for $1,300 a night. In addition to its proximity to Isabella, I needed an expensive room in case the room safes for commoners were different than those provided to the fancy people. The lady said I could move in today, but I ended up getting it for Thursday, two days before Isabella was set to arrive. I confirmed a checkout time of Friday, next week.

  Ultimately, I decided to stick with the plan to rob Danny. That way, if the Poseidon thing didn’t pan out, I’d have something to show for my trip. Thirteen hundred a night was a lot to blow on a room, no matter how nice it was. Unlike Ted, Bo Mosley didn’t have a secure way to fill his account every two weeks, and the rent was due the same time each month.

  With nothing to do, I put on my swim trunks and went to the hotel pool. I couldn’t remember the last time I had simply relaxed. It felt nice soaking in the warm water, occasionally paddling back and forth to the floating bar for a piña colada. Just enjoying the sun and taking it easy. Fun, fun. An hour later, I couldn’t stand it anymore and got out my laptop, then sat under the palmetto awning doing what I enjoyed most: researching what I needed for my next score. Specifically, everything about the Poseidon and those places on the island selling things I might need—like the Radio Shack listed downtown, or the hardware store, or the locksmith two blocks from there.

  It would have been nice to move into the Poseidon today so I could start casing the place. I almost went back to see if I could change the reservations, then held off. The last thing I needed was to leave a memorable impression by showing up again and causing extra work for someone.

  At one point during my poolside adventures, I logged into my Linux system at home and, from there, logged into my work PC. I was curious how Brian was doing and wondered if his attitude had gotten him fired.

  Because of the life I led, I was naturally cautious. Occasionally downright paranoid. So when I found my work PC had been rebooted, it gave me pause. By itself, no big deal. Corporate Services handled PCs and corporate email and anything running on Windows, and they regularly scheduled maintenance to address the endless number of bugs and vulnerabilities that kept them all gainfully employed. The way they set it up, our work computers were the only systems we could use to reach the jump hosts, which were special computers used to connect to the servers in the datacenter.

  From my PC, I connected to the jump host we used to reach the server farm and noticed something else: it prompted me with the challenge you get when connecting to a server for the very first time, asking me was I sure about accepting its host key. It shouldn’t have done that. I’d downloaded that key ages ago and it should have been cached. Curious, but again, probably nothing to worry about. For all I knew, the admins had done a host refresh or given the jump host a new network card or IP address. Something like that would have caused my program to get all uppity and start demanding credentials.

  Yeah. Or maybe they’d cloned my account and set me up on a special forensic server to watch my every move.

  I clicked Yes, logged onto the jump host, and checked the audit log—and that’s when I got nervous. Not only was it the same server with the same IP as before, it had been powered on for more than a year. I checked a few things and my blood ran cold—someone had cloned my command history. Anything I typed would be copied to a file in another person’s home directory. Whoever was doing it, I didn’t want them thinking I cared, so I left it alone.

  Sighing, I slouched back on the deck chair, feeling stupid in my bathing suit and tipsy from three piña coladas and a fourth melting, untouched, beside me. I racked my brain and tried to come up with a way to gather more information.

  For lack of options, I logged out and back in again, this time using Sean’s account, whose password I knew. Next, I checked to see who was on—about ten people, but it was a popular server. I also noticed three of our security admins were on, each with short idle times—one of them only six seconds. I wasn’t used to seeing security logged in, and never all at once.

  With more than four million mailboxes, running audits across the environment was a torturous job. So much so that when I hunted for Huxley Capital shipments I ran my script over the course of several days. The security guys would have to do the same thing if they wanted to find my rootshell exploit, which I’d hidden to look like something innocent in one of our customers’ catch-all directories. It was a tiny hack designed to give me elevated access.

  Hoping I was just being paranoid, I ran it.

  When I traced the security weenie with the lowest idle time, I started to sweat—he was actively tracing me, just like I was doing to him.

  Quickly, I deleted the rootshell, but almost didn’t make it in time. A second after hitting return, someone killed my connection.

  Leaning back in my chair, I gazed around me at the beauty of the Bahamas, at the sunbathers and tropical plants and impossibly blue skies. On the other side of the pool, I saw Donald walking with a champagne bottle. He noticed me and waved. Probably off to charm a twenty from another satisfied customer. Perversely, I felt the need to keep up appearances, so I waved back.

  But yeah, the jig was up.
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  ***

  I was still logged into my home PC. My guess was they’d caught me reading people’s email. If they knew more than that, I hoped my crimes were being treated as an internal thing—that they’d learned what I’d been doing and were going to fire me quietly so as to stay out of the news. If Milestone had gone to the law, the police would raid Ted’s apartment, where Anna was.

  Anna needed to get out of there—but first I needed to dump some evidence.

  My home computer used a RAM disk rather than a conventional hard drive—basically everything from the physical disk copied into memory and then swapped after boot-up. After that, everything got executed and saved in RAM—and wiped as soon as I turned the computer off.

  I’m not a hacker. I don’t hack. Sure, that rootshell was a hack, but I’d never needed it until today. Since I’m not a hacker, the only thing I used my home computer for was to search the web or read email. And since I did it all on a RAM disk, none of my browser activity was saved, so I never needed to zero my disk every time I researched an alarm system or read a forum post on a new kind of lock. But I hadn’t rebooted my system in months, and I’d done a lot of incriminating research since then.

  I turned it off, wiping it clean. Sure, they probably would have unplugged it when they seized it—half the reason for setting it up this way—but I liked to cover my bases.

  Marginally safer, I got out my throwaway phone and called Ted’s apartment phone, which was the phone Anna used to call me while I was creeping around Danny Fleer’s house. Anna picked up on the second ring.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Hey, it’s me,” I said, going for a serious tone. I purposely didn’t use her name and hoped she noticed.

  “Bo? What’s wrong?”

  Yeah, I winced.

  “Lots,” I said. “You need to get out of there. I’m not sure how long until the police show up. So uh, you remember the old lady?”

  “What? Bo?” She didn’t sound scared, just confused.

  “The old lady,” I said. “Just get your stuff and go there, to the old lady’s house, and don’t use the apartment phone for anything. You haven’t used it again, have you?”

  “No, I only used mine. My plan’s cheap and you’re out of the country.”

  She sounded guilty about it, the poor thing.

  “Look,” I said. “I might be in trouble. If so, I don’t want you involved. How fast can you get out of there?”

  For a moment I thought Anna would argue with me, but in the end she said, “I’ll leave now. What are you going to do? Right—you can’t tell me, can you?” She went quiet for a moment. “Just take care of yourself, okay?”

  “Thanks,” I said, purposely letting my relief show. I needed her to know this was real, that I wasn’t trying to brush her out of my life.

  “Bye, Bo. Be careful.”

  “I’m really sorry,” I said. “I’ll call you when I can, but it might be a while.”

  “I know,” she said.

  With nothing more to say, we hung up. I wondered if she believed me. Ever since seeing Anna again I’d been nothing but a jerk to her. What bothered me most was she didn’t seem to mind.

  If the police were involved, a subpoena to my neighbor’s cable company would link her IP address to the one I used to connect to work. Now, thanks to Anna’s slip, it wouldn’t take long to figure out who Bo was, next door. When they got a search warrant for my apartment and found all my cool thiefy stuff, I was toast.

  I racked my brain for someone who could go to my apartment and clean everything out, but the only one I could think of was Scott Horton, and he was way up in Jersey City. Even if he lived nearby, I couldn’t trust him, not after what Mrs. Swanson had said. I was in a bad spot, but that’s what happens when you work nights and spend all your free time stealing from people.

  My phone showed four o’clock. I called Ted’s bank using the number on the back of the card and told them to expect a lot of high-priced purchases in the Bahamas, that I was living it up and didn’t want my card declined, and while they were at it, please raise my daily spending limit to the maximum. They said they’d add a note to my account and that it would take twenty-four hours to process the change. I grimaced at the wait and thanked them. Then I hung up and did the same thing with my Bo Mosley account and smiled when they told me the change would take place immediately. I could spend $10,000 a day, she said, but I still couldn’t withdraw more than a thousand in cash from an ATM in a single day.

  I got directions from the concierge to the Bank of the Bahamas. When I got there, just after four o’clock, I shook my head and tried not to swear.

  They’d closed at three thirty.

  Chapter 12

  The Bank of the Bahamas limited customers to no more than $500 per ATM transaction, so I took out my daily thousand in two equal withdrawals.

  On the way home, I saw a horse-drawn carriage with an older couple whose heads bobbed with every bump. Neither seemed to enjoy the Caribbean loveliness around them but were going through the motions anyway. I couldn’t enjoy it either. All those times breaking into someplace, I was the driver. I controlled the planning and execution. If anything went wrong, I used my wits to work it out. But this Milestone thing had me worried, possibly for no reason at all. And now I was about to uproot my hard-laundered finances to this godforsaken island, most of it into a safe deposit box where I couldn’t use it to pay rent or buy cool gizmos online or anything that didn’t involve a receipt with my change.

  Sure, I could wire it from the States, but then I’d be in the same place as before. The feds would trace the transaction and grab it all back. Maybe. I didn’t know, but figured a tourist nation like the Bahamas wasn’t about to jeopardize its relations with the U.S. to protect the notorious Bo Mosley.

  What had aroused Milestone’s suspicion? All my scripts were run straight from standard input on a little-used provisioning server with access to Milestone’s mail volumes. Our security guys didn’t have time to catch bad apples like me. They were too busy fending off the thousands of automated spam floods and port scans by zealots with beefs against people. Having been on the other end of midnight calls during major attacks, I knew how busy they were. Which meant I shouldn’t have been caught with the subtle stuff I was doing.

  My bullion scheme shouldn’t have been big enough or frequent enough to throw up any red flags. Then again, I could have underestimated how serious the authorities would take the eight total heists I’d pulled. Ted Randal worked at Milestone Communications, not Bo Mosley. Bo Mosley stole bullion, not Ted Randal. For those worlds to meet… If I’d messed up and someone smart or lucky had found a thread, given a tug…

  I tried calling my boss, Lucas, and got dumped to voicemail. Tomorrow morning I’d try again and see how he acted. If the police were involved, he’d act busy and say he couldn’t talk right now, but could I call later? If all he wanted to do was fire me he’d either do it then, over the phone, or call me into the office to do it in person.

  What to do with all this restless energy. I felt so … like I was trapped when I needed to be home where I could do something. Clean out my apartment, at the very least.

  Mom and Dad had both been big drinkers, not to mention drug users. Rather than perpetuate the family curse, I always drank in moderation. And when I’d gotten my wisdom teeth out and needed pain meds, I learned without a doubt that man-made highs weren’t my thing. But now, for the first time ever, I knew I needed a drink. It frightened me that the weakness could arise in me so suddenly.

  Rather than indulge the feeling, I changed clothes and worked off my nervous energy in the hotel gym. The room was empty, so I didn’t have to share equipment. After finishing a light upper-body workout with lots of reps, followed by a twenty-minute jog, I strolled back to my room and took a shower. I even whistled. While lathering up, I dropped the soap, and on reaching down I remembered the reason I’d taken up weight-training and all those self-defense classes—to survive prison.<
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  Well, that did it. With all the suddenness of a twice-passed prison shank, the anxiety I’d shed in the gym came crashing back.

  Dammit, I needed to do something, and dumbbells and hamster wheels weren’t cutting it. I needed to hit Danny’s safe—tonight—or I’d go bonkers worrying about what was happening in the States.

  Deciding to do it calmed me down considerably. So much so that all the sun by the pool, the adrenaline-charged race against the security weenies, and the long exercise finally caught up to me.

  Before taking the nap I’d need for tonight, I drove to a sub shop I’d seen downtown and brought back two six-inch sandwiches with no onions or peppers or anything that would give off a strong scent. One of the worst experiences I’d ever had was hiding in a house for sixteen hours and having to endure the smells of breakfast, lunch, and dinner being cooked, with nothing I could do about it. Since then, I always brought something with me on a job.

  My room had a little refrigerator, so I popped the subs inside and then took a long, dreamless, industrial-strength nap. When I finally got up, my weariness was so thick I felt entombed by it. It took everything in me to get up and hop in the shower to wake up. After wolfing down one of the subs and using up my last packet of mayonnaise/hinge lubricant in the process, I went through my bag and took an inventory of everything I’d need. Then it was back out to Danny’s house for the second night in a row.

  By the time I got there, the sun had been down for two hours. Last time, Danny had arrived about an hour after dusk with the girl I was calling Alvita. Unlike before, someone was home.

  The air was warm and muggy. There were insects, too—biting me through my clothing and whirring like dentist drills in my ears. It probably didn’t help that I was hiding in the low scrub at the edge of the property. I’d parked my scooter more or less where I had last time, though I’d pushed it down more into the trees and covered the reflectors with electrical tape. With luck I might even find it again.