by Roger Hobbs
I looked at the blinking name long and hard. Jack.
If the e-mail were from anyone else, I would’ve deleted it by now. If the e-mail were from anyone else, I’d be closing the account and deleting all my messages. If the e-mail were from anyone else, I’d be frying the computers, packing my duffel and buying a ticket for the next flight to Russia. I’d be gone in twenty minutes.
But it wasn’t from anyone else.
Only two people in the world knew that name.
I stood up and went to the dresser by my window. I pushed aside a pile of money and a yellow legal pad full of notes. When I’m not on a job, I translate the classics. I pulled a white shirt out of the drawer, a gray two-piece suit from the closet and a leather shoulder holster from my dresser. I fished a little chrome revolver from the box on top: a Detective Special with the trigger guard and hammer spur filed off. I filled it with a handful of .38 hollow points. When I was dressed and ready, I took out an old prepaid international phone, powered it up and punched in the numbers.
The phone didn’t even ring. It just went right to connection.
“It’s me,” I said.
“You’re a hard man to find, Jack.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to come to my clubhouse,” Marcus said. “Before you ask, you still owe me.”
2
Even from across the street, the Five Star Diner smelled of cigarettes and aftershave. It was wedged like a garbage can between a restaurateur’s alleyway and a porn shop in the drinking half of Belltown, a block from the Space Needle and just shy of South Lake. A pack of motorcycles were parked under the streetlight. The inside was lit by the faint glow of neon and a jukebox full of shiny compact disks. The front door was propped open. Even at this hour the heat hadn’t let up.
The cab driver made a rolling stop out front. Compared to the places where I used to work, like Vegas or São Paulo, there are very few bad neighborhoods in Seattle, which is practically spotless by comparison. This neighborhood was an exception. The alley looked like a homeless shelter, full of blankets and bottles and stinking of skunk beer and motor oil. I paid the fare through the cash-sized gap in the plastic shield, and the driver didn’t wait around. He drove off as soon as I had my feet on the pavement and both hands off the door.
I walked down the alley and went in through the kitchen. The Five Star was a public place, I figured. It’s harder to do anything really awful to someone in a place where anybody with eyes or ears could be a witness. Marcus was trying to tell me that he didn’t want to kill me. If he’d wanted to kill me, he wouldn’t have bothered to send me a message. He would’ve found me himself, put a pillow over my head and then a bullet through it, like he did back in the day. Meeting here was like standing on the sidewalk in front of a police station. There was a twisted sort of logic to it. It gave me one reason to take comfort.
Marcus had never killed anyone in his own restaurant before.
Still, he did have plenty of reasons to take me out. A job we’d worked on together had fallen apart, and his reputation had gone down with it. He went from international mastermind to scumbag drug lord overnight. He used to have his pick of the best operators in the world. Now he had to hire scum off the street for protection. After that job I thought he’d never want to see me again. I thought that he’d as soon shoot me as send me an e-mail. But somehow I knew this day was coming. I owed him.
The guard in the back was expecting me. He was a big guy in a denim cut who took a good look at my new face before letting me through. He nodded like he recognized me, but I was sure he didn’t. I’ve changed so many times that even I forget what I look like. The most recent incarnation had brown hair the color of caramel and hazelnut eyes, with white skin from too many days inside. Not all of it’s plastic surgery. Contact lenses, weight loss and hair dye can change a man better than fifty grand of knife work, but that isn’t the half of it. If you learn to change your voice and how you walk, you can become whomever you want in ten seconds flat. The only thing you can’t change is the smell, I’ve learned. You can mask it with whiskey and perfume and expensive creams, but the way you smell is the way you smell. My mentor taught me that. I will always smell of black pepper and coriander.
I went in past the line cook, who was taking a break with a nonfilter cigarette on the upturned flat of a soup-base can. I nudged behind the flat top through the kitchen where the Mexican fry cook was working. He glanced at me, then quickly looked away. The kitchen smelled of bacon, chorizo, fried eggs and salted butter. I crossed through the servers’ doors into the back of the place. Marcus was waiting for me in the eighth booth under a neon Bud Light sign. He sat in front of an untouched plate of ham and eggs, with a cup of coffee at his elbow.
He didn’t speak until I was close.
“Jack,” he said.
“I thought I’d never see you again.”
Marcus Hayes was tall and stringy, like the president of some computer company. He was as thin as a stalk and looked uncomfortable in his own skin. The most successful criminals don’t look the part. He wore a dark blue oxford shirt and coke-bottle trifocals. His eyes went bad after serving a six-pack on a work camp on the Snake River in Oregon. His irises were dull blue and faded around the pupils. He was only ten years older than me, but he looked much older than that. The palms of his hands had gone leathery. His appearance didn’t fool me.
He was the most brutal man I’d ever met.
I slid into the booth across from him and peered under the table. No heat. I’ve never been shot at from under a table before, but it would be easy enough, especially for a man like him. A P220 or some other small pistol with a silencer might do the trick. Subsonic bullet. One to the gut, one to the heart. He’d have one of the cooks chop off my hands and head, wrap me up in garbage bags and dump the rest of me in the bay. It would be like I never even existed.
Marcus stretched his fingers in mild annoyance. “Don’t insult me,” he said. “I didn’t bring you in to kill you, Jack.”
“I just thought I was burned in your book. I thought you never wanted to work with me again.”
“Then clearly you were wrong.”
“I got that much.”
Marcus didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. I looked him right in the eye. He held out his palm, open on the table, and shook his head like he was disappointed.
“The bullets,” he said.
I said, “I didn’t know your intentions.”
Marcus said, “The bullets, please.”
I responded slowly. I took the revolver out of my shoulder holster with two fingers, to let him know I didn’t plan on using it. I released the cylinder and pushed out all the bullets. I put the handful of hollow points on the table next to his plate. They clattered on the wood like silverware. They rolled around for a moment before coming to a stop halfway between me and him.
I holstered the gun.
“What’s this about?” I said.
“Did you know Hector Moreno?”
I nodded slowly. Noncommittally.
“He’s dead,” Marcus said.
I didn’t react much. It wasn’t really news. I knew Moreno was heading for an early grave the first time I met him. I was in a bar in Dubai a couple of years ago. I was drinking an orange juice for the ride home. It was a classy place, full of guys in suits. Moreno came up from behind me all dressed up in a new pinstripe Armani. He smoked no-bull cigarettes, two puffs at a time. When he spoke, he mixed in words from a language I couldn’t understand. Arabic, or maybe Persian. He fired up a love rose behind the shed in the parking lot when we were done talking. I could smell the freebase cocaine in his clothing and I could see his heart beating through his ribs. He was as much a soldier as I was Santa Claus.
“What does this have to do with me?” I said to Marcus.
“How well did you know him?”
“Well enough.”
“How well?”
“As well as I know you, Marcus, and I know y
ou brought me here to listen, not to talk about some crackhead I met on a job.”
“All the same, Jack,” Marcus said. “Moreno ate a bullet this morning and he deserves our respect. He was one of us to the end.”
“The day I give a murderer like Moreno respect I’ll eat a bullet myself.”
We were silent for a second as I studied Marcus’s face. His eyes looked strained. There were brown rings in his coffee cup. There was no steam off the coffee. No little creamer cups, no empty sugar packets. Just crusty brown rings, and a black sludge that started about halfway down. The cup had been poured at least three hours ago. Nobody orders coffee at three in the morning.
“What’s this about?” I asked.
Marcus reached into his pocket and produced a wad of twenty-dollar bills the size of a paperback book, wrapped up with rubber bands. He set it on the table. “This morning,” he said, “my heist with Moreno went bad. Bodies everywhere, loot missing, feds circling sort of bad.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I want you to do what you do best,” he said. “I want you to make it disappear.”
3
Five thousand dollars doesn’t look like five thousand dollars. It never does, even after you’ve counted it twice, as I’m sure Marcus had. Five grand always just looks like a stack of green paper two and a half inches wide, six inches long and eight inches high. It could be two grand, or it could be twenty. At a certain point, the brain can’t count it all fast. It just looks like a lot.
Marcus slid the stack toward me, through the bullets.
I looked at it. “With all due respect, Marcus, I don’t get out of bed for less than two hundred grand.”
“This isn’t an offer, Jack. These are cash expenses. You’re going to do this for me because you still owe me. You’ve owed me for five years.”
I couldn’t argue. I’m not even sure I wanted to.
Marcus told me all about it. He started thirty minutes before the heist and walked me through it like he was narrating a boxing match blow by blow. There was something broken about the way he talked, as if he’d learned to speak by reading telegraphs or talking to one of those automated phone machines. It was all a series of facts to him, spoken in short bursts, with no time to breathe in the middle. He said, “I suppose you haven’t heard anything about this, considering it’s still early here, but it’s all over the news out east. Four people were killed, including Moreno. The target was a big brick of bank money on its way to a casino. Easy as you can imagine. A thirty-second job. I thought even idiots like him and his partner couldn’t screw it up. They had to avoid a few cameras, put the scare on a couple armored-car guys, grab the money and drive off. Once they bounced the heat, they were supposed to head north to a self-storage facility, call me and wait it out. It was supposed to be the easiest deal in the world.”
“But Moreno ate a bullet.” I said.
“And I never got the call.”
“Why were you even using Moreno? I can’t imagine his partner was that much better.”
“They were disposable.”
I chewed it over. “What was the take?”
“A million and change in hundred-dollar bills. Exactly how much depended on the casino numbers. First weekend in July, first delivery of the day, it was probably looking more like a million two, million three. Enough to cover the morning cash rush from last night.”
“How do you know Moreno got shot?”
Marcus nodded to the television playing in the corner. “One of the robbers got shot. Guy had white skin. Moreno’s partner was black. You ever see a security photo on TV before of one of your own guys?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve seen two.”
“When did the job go down?”
Marcus looked at his watch. Like me, he was wearing a Patek Philippe.
He said, “Almost four hours ago, now.”
I put my hand on the money. “You want my advice? Wait. Four hours is no time at all. Four hours after my last heist I barely had time to catch my breath, let alone call anybody. I was up to my neck in Vegas heat. I didn’t know who was dead, I didn’t know who got caught, I didn’t know who had the checks. I didn’t know anything. The only thing on my mind was getting to the safe house and laying low until hell and the district attorney froze over. And if you think those TV reporters know what happened, they don’t. Moreno could be out of surgery and in county jail by eleven. Nobody will know anything solid until noon at the earliest, and you won’t be able to move on any of it until the dust settles, probably tomorrow. I know you’re worried that this black guy—”
“Ribbons. Jerome Ribbons.”
“I know you’re worried that Ribbons is vanishing on you, but you’ve got to wait and see about it. If you go in too hard he might think you’re after him for screwing up the heist, and then he’ll never show.”
“This isn’t one of those things that can wait,” Marcus said. “The item Ribbons and Moreno stole is extremely dangerous. I’m on a forty-eight-hour clock here.”
“The money’s dangerous?”
“Yes, the money. The cash money. The goddamn unmarked, shrink-wrapped, sequential, genuine Federal Reserve notes. Shipped specially from D.C. to the Philadelphia Federal Reserve branch for distribution to the casinos in south Jersey. The notes, Jack.”
“What’s the problem with them?”
Marcus nodded at the stack of twenties in my hands.
“They’ve still got the federal payload,” he said.
4
Federal payload.
Two words nobody wants to hear.
Especially not me, and I’ve never even dealt with a federal payload before. It’s like the perverse punch line at the end of the absurd story that’s bank security. It has to do with how the Federal Reserve transports cash. Once the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington finishes a print run, they put the freshly printed notes through a machine that lumps the money into thousand-bill wads, each subdivided into hundred-bill straps. At the end of the process, they vacuum-pack the money in cellophane to make it easier to transport. They print a half a billion dollars every day. They spend millions just on plastic wrap, because sometimes a print load can weigh as much as five hundred metric tons. The vacuum packing can bring the volume of each wad down by a quarter, which means more efficient transport. Once the money is wrapped, it’s put into trucks. The trucks drive to the Treasury, where the money is scanned by a computer and serial numbers are monetized. Then the trucks drive the money to one of the eleven banks on the backbone of the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve banks scan the money a second time, then put it on different trucks and distribute it to smaller banks all over the world. The receiving banks scan the money a third time, then tear open the cellophane and spread out the currency to the masses. But it isn’t all inflation. The Fed exchanges older notes with newer ones, so the amount of money in circulation is almost the same, give or take a few percentage points a year. The older bills are collected by the smaller banks, shipped to the bigger banks, driven back to the Treasury, shredded and burned. One big cycle.
To guys like me, a sixty-ton pallet of fresh hundred-dollar bills sounds too good to be true. That’s because, as far as I’m concerned, it is too good to be true. Nobody’s ever tried to rob a Fed truck, not to mention pulled it off, because nobody’s that stupid. It can’t be done. The reason is that the government doesn’t give two shits what happens to the cash while they’re moving it. They protect it like all get out with armed personnel and blind-decoy trucks and everything, but the moment they think the bad guys might actually pull one off, they’ll torch the whole load. Long story short: the Federal Reserve only pays the government around ten cents for every bill they print, which essentially covers the cost of ink and paper. If the money gets burned, it doesn’t really count against the bottom line. All the bank loses is paper. They just order more from the printer and a few smaller banks have to make do with older bills for a while. Meanwhile, if the money g
ets stolen and the guys get away with it, every single dollar lost in that shipment is inflation. Sure, a couple billion dollars isn’t all that much compared to the total GDP, but even the smallest bit of inflation harms the credibility of the whole U.S. monetary system. Word of the heist would get out from Boston to Bangladesh in ten hours. Once there’s word that there’s a hole in the system, every crew in the country would try to take down the Federal Reserve. One slipup, and Uncle Sam would have a whole other thing coming.
So that’s where the federal payload comes in.
The federal payload is essentially an ink bomb placed in all the money that comes out of Washington. Every couple hundred bills, there’s a very thin, almost undetectable, explosive device. This device has three parts. There is a packet of indelible ink, a battery that doubles as an explosive charge and a GPS locator that acts as a trigger. While the Feds are trucking the money around the country to and from the banks on the backbone of the system, they keep these big cellophane-covered wads on an electromagnetic plate. The plate’s a wireless battery charger, like those things they have now for cell phones. As soon as the cash is removed from the plate, the batteries on the explosive devices hidden in the bills start to drain. If the batteries run out, the cash blows up. If the cellophane gets cut open prematurely, the cash blows up. If the GPS locator hooks up with the wrong satellite, the cash blows up.
Department stores often put tags on their expensive clothing, right? If some dumb kid tries to sneak a Vera Wang out the front door of Nordstrom, a signal gets sent to the little radio frequency identification marker on the dress. You know, those circular little plastic things. The klaxons go off on the door, because the RFID bars can sense when a dress that hasn’t been bought yet is moving. If that doesn’t bust the kid, then there’s a packet of indelible ink attached to the bottom of the dress that’ll blow up a couple of feet out the door. When it does, the clothing is ruined and the kid gets caught. The department stores do this because if a piece of clothing gets ruined this way, they can claim a loss of full retail price, plus legal fees and punitive damages from the shoplifter. Also, the prospect of exploding clothing is a strong deterrent. It’s the same principle with the federal payload. If the money gets stolen, it’s on a timer. Unless a qualified vault manager scans it with a very particular receiving code within a certain amount of time, usually just a few days, the money goes bye-bye. Federal payload is the kiss of death.