Robko said, “Congratulations. If you get away clean, you’ve done your first rack.”
She grasped his face with both hands and gave him a kiss. Sudden, savage—a heavy crush on his mouth, and a deep pelvic rub. She released him with a shove, throwing him back. She pivoted towards the deck, to the swath of night sky and the lights of L.A.
At the top of the gully, he trundled the bike out from behind the manzanita. They mounted, and he fired up the Italian.
Wheeling down out of the mountains towards the coast, the pair swept through each set of bends, graceful and delicate. She leaned hard against his back, and her hands beat a tattoo on his thighs. She leaned over his shoulder to shout, “It’s so good to be riding again. Let’s drop the bag off at home, pack, and run down the coast to San Diego. Spend a couple of days.”
“You’re kidding. Five minutes after a job?”
“Where’s your impulsiveness? You always get to be the irresponsible one. It’s my turn.”
They skated back into the brash city grid of Los Angeles, dazzling in its midnight lights after the dark hills. He eased to a stop at a light. “We’ve got a drop-off to make first. I’ve rented a lockup to keep the score.”
“Rule twelve: don’t sleep with the flash under your bed.”
“Right, did that once too often. Then we’ll ride down to Dago.”
“Can we stay at the Coronado? It’s been so long since we’ve been in a first class hotel.”
Three times on the way to San Diego they passed traffic cameras serviced by Tran Cam, but the helmets and the temporary black paint sprayed onto the bike fooled the software. South of L.A., graff splayed across a concrete embankment above them as Robko arrowed down the freeway. Its message, waiting for him, said, “Love Speeds South to Crash in Passion.” He was already thinking about her bottom, and that curve and tuck at the base of her spine.
Chapter Twenty: Come and Make Me Well
So they had money again, so what? Life didn’t change, just the brand of champagne.
Wednesday, they cleaned the temporary paint out of every nook and cranny of the bike, and Robko turned the quarter-million in bonds into two hundred thousand in cash. Thursday through Saturday, the illegal bar set up and did business. Sunday, Robko worked a tough session moving the Phatal nightclub out of its warehouse, and Monday they sloughed along in a down day. The shop surrounded them, one third of their domain, the den where high-tech skankers puttered around and did much of nothing. They futzed among the clutter and the machine bits of their craft. The desktab was open showing Sibyl’s recent photos scrolling by. She sang to herself, content. This irritated Robko, and he wished the crooning would stop—it interfered with the buzzing in his head. He said, “Are you sure those photos are safe?”
“In the cloud, encrypted, under another name. When I go legit, I don’t want them tied back to whoring.”
“Are you sure that wouldn’t be a come-on?”
“One-shot celebrity. Not sustainable.”
In front of him, he had a legal pad where he doodled. O’Brien lurked in the corner of the page—a bald head, angry eyes, and bear-like teeth. A rough sketch of the Artifact dominated the middle, and Steward’s name appeared three times in block letters across the bottom. There was an outline of Georgia, with an arrow leading across to something that was supposed to be Manhattan. He made a little row of dots down one side. He put squares around the dots. As he churned it over and over, he also waited for a bit of intuition on what to do next. It clicked.
With the glimmer of an idea, he corkscrewed around and peered at her. The decision would depend as much on her as on him. She bent over the manual of an electronic safe, her homework for the week. Her shag hung round her head, off her neck; she twisted a strand of hair into a curl, released, and then teased again.
Let the idea come out naturally; let it walk first and then run as he told her about it. “So, want to jump on the bike, go down to the beach, watch the sunset?”
At his voice, she straightened up and pushed a mass of black hair back. “Like, a date? Sure.”
“I thought you’d ask me for five hundred first.”
A lazy smile, but he could see her canines. “I have my own money now.”
They rolled out the motorcycle and brought a bottle of water, a blanket, and a bottle of wine and a glass for her. In the hot late-afternoon, light slanted sideways casting opaque shadows, blue-black. He motored them down to the beach without much rush, sliding along in the moment. Setting up not far off the parking lot, they leaned back on their elbows and stared off to the west. “So,” she said, “what did you want to talk about?”
“I just needed to get out of the house.”
“I don’t think so, but I can wait.” She did wait, and time stretched out for five minutes.
The surf had the same dull thump as his barb-slowed heartbeat. “It’s O’Brien.”
“Of course.”
“He’s stuck in my brain… in my throat.”
“I’ve been thinking about it too, the history of it all. I mean, what else should your crew have expected? O’Brien just reacted to what you did.” She leaned back into his shoulder, her hair tickling his nose.
He blew out a strand of her hair that had slipped into his mouth. “I broke in and stole the keys to the kingdom. It wasn’t that big a thing.”
“And the King sent his troops after you.”
Leaning slightly away, he could see her face in profile, her eyes squinting out into the sunset. “Lot of damage since.”
“You mean Carl and Isobel Dupont.”
“I think they’re both dead. I did nothing to prevent it. But they’re not what bothers me the most. It’s Mirko.”
She slid down, her skull pushing under his collar bone. “Ah. Some things are hard to get through.”
“Mirko was my friend. I lead them directly to him. Now he’s dead.”
“And you’re not.”
He couldn’t see her face now. She probably had adopted that guarded, reasonable countenance. “You think I have survivor guilt? Maybe I do, but it freezes my heart. I want this LeFarge, and I want O’Brien.”
She said, “We have a good life now. You always say, ‘Never make a stand if you can hide, and never hide if you can run.’ What happened to my footloose skanker?”
“Don’t you ever feel a sense of powerlessness?”
“Huh. I’m a woman in the hospitality trade.”
“Point taken… but you changed that, got some control back.”
She sniffed. “You said we were pretty much invulnerable since we ran away from everything in New York.”
“True, but I need something more. I don’t want to run anymore.”
“Maybe people do change, a tiny bit. Maybe you’re not such a lazy ass anymore. What do you want to do to O’Brien?”
“Hurt him, of course. Real bad. I want to bleed him out.” He nodded, realizing now what he had been thinking for days. “Drink your wine.”
The sun glimmered its way down nearly to the end by the time they spoke again. A dark line bisected the hot orange. The orb flattened out into an ellipse and lost its bottom half. The sky emitted a green flash. Robko took it as an omen. Money came green and flashy. The blue gray darkening that followed the setting sun—well, he lived in a dark world.
She said, “How do you hurt him? Especially while he’s hunting us?”
“He wants the Artifact. Let’s give it to him.”
“A fake?”
He liked this part, could feel the grin breaking out across his face. “No, the real thing. There are two left. What we have to do is steal them and give one of them to him. That’ll get him off our backs.”
She held a finger up between them and the western view. “First, won’t he know the Artifacts are gone?”
“Deception is everything. He’ll know, but only when we show him the trick.”
She snorted. She held up the second finger. “Second, won’t he figure out who stole the two remaining doo-d
ahs? Doesn’t that put us back in the kill zone?”
“Well, we keep one for insurance.”
“What do you mean?”
“Steward’s files said there are two men O’Brien hates more than anyone else in the world, Carstairs and Thurgall. Probably because they’re so much like him. Rich, powerful, manipulative people—only they’ve got a lot more gloss on them than O’Brien. I checked online. Carstairs is English and very upper class. Thurgall is California’s next Howard Hughes or Joey Ellison.”
“So O’Brien proves susceptible to jealousy. No surprise.”
“You missed it. We use these two yo-yos for leverage. I tell O’Brien that if he crosses us, the third artifact goes to one of them.”
“Oh.” She thought about it. “So why give the second Artifact to him? Why not keep it if you have the insurance?”
“It’s the deal we make. It’s his consolation prize.”
She wriggled—not sold yet. “Getting the second one back makes up for losing the first, and the third keeps him from coming after us? Do-si-do, around we go?”
“I hear your sarcasm. The second Artifact proves we have the third. The third is the important one, because we hang it over his head. Let’s hope he’s smart enough to follow the argument.”
“He’s smart enough to have an empire of stolen companies.”
He pushed his chin down on top of her head. “We need a plan.”
She crossed her ankles, lazy in the evening heat. “I thought you had a plan.”
“Early days. I need to know where to find the Artifacts. I need to know how they’re protected. I need to know how to rip them off without signaling that they’re gone.”
She snorted again. “That’s a lot of needs.”
“But we have some advantages.”
“Name one.”
“We have the basic security systems for several of his places. I’m betting on the lab in Georgia.”
“That’s one advantage….”
He shrugged, making her head bob. “We have time and money.”
She rolled half over onto him, and nestled her face into his chest. “Let’s spend yours first.”
***
Fall brought the rainy season to New York. Temperatures dropped, baseball began to wrap up as it headed into the Series; rain filled the gutters and floated the litter down into the storm drains. The quintessential center of the hip world may have been located in Manhattan, but even hip punkers and blinged-up drug lords carried umbrellas and scurried under the awnings.
Thomas could tell the team had turned hot, red hot. They ferreted out the links to two memory devices and then went on to crack another two. O’Brien obliged them for this success and gave them more names, more lambs. Their net grew. On the day they broke open a lead on their seventh memdevice, Thomas ferried the team down to the bar across the avenue to celebrate.
He wanted to talk to Angie off-line, out of the office. He had to maneuver around a bit as the team floated back and forth to the bar and through the tables, but at last he sauntered about the room beside her. “Haven’t seen you much lately.”
She wrapped her arm around him and squeezed. “I still haven’t thanked you for the promotion and the raise.”
“The title isn’t great, but this pay grade takes home executive bonuses.”
“The title is fine.”
He linked his arm through hers and led her away from a noisy foursome. “Senior Operations Manager?” He snorted. “What you are is ‘Spy Master of MI5.’”
“I like the title, and I love the money.”
They strolled another dozen steps and wove round a waiter with a tray of champagne. Thomas cleared his throat. “So, you’ve been flying solo the last week or so.”
She glanced over, offered a secret smile and patted his arm. “You don’t need to see all the detail. Someone else should bring it together, while you think the deep thoughts.”
“Such as?”
“Such as convincing LeFarge not to kill us.”
He could read her face. How can he be so dense? “Yeah, that. We’ll put a fail-safe in place. If one of us dies, there’s evidence that goes to the police. We tell him so.”
“You know my objection,” said Angie. “It takes down O’Brien—maybe—but LeFarge can always just disappear.”
“Jean hasn’t found the money trail yet, has she?”
“Good news there. She’s close to wrapping it up. She wants to see us tomorrow.”
He beamed. “Great. I worried that she was our mole.”
“Not Jean. She’s one of your fans.”
He snorted. “Like I have a fan base.”
“Sure. You’ve changed a bit, and they’ve changed with you. The ones that imitate you the most are your fans.”
“Huh?”
“The black clothes, the spiky short hair? Strange hours, moody days. You don’t look or act like a CEO anymore, unless it’s a CEO in the movie business. And some of your team, they’re changing to match.”
“So I have a new tailor… or a new girlfriend… but you’re saying the team is changing too?”
“Oh, yeah. Everyone thinks he’s a predator now, and in chic New York black. Even our IT guy looks less NASA and more Manhattan. He wore an Italian blazer today.”
“Cashmere. I noticed.”
The crowd split them apart, but they circled back together and resumed.
He said, “Who do you think is our in-house traitor?”
“Let me fetch you a drink first.”
“Tonic, then, and lime.”
“You’re not drinking much lately.”
“Bad for my health.”
“Bad for those pills,” she said. When she returned, she nestled the tonic into his hand. “Don’t be an idiot about this. You can’t get away with it forever.”
“I’m already a marked man. My fingerprints are all over a murder scene.”
She made an exasperated sound, a “ghaak.”
He knew enough to change the conversation. “You didn’t answer. Who is our mole?”
“A better question is ‘What is our mole?’ If the spy in our midst is merely ambitious, we have a leak that reports back to O’Brien. If the spy works for LeFarge, then Zlata dies; then possibly we die.”
“It’s O’Brien who calls within minutes after we discover something important.”
She flashed out the crooked, ironic grin. “Yes. Reassuring, in a strange way.”
“That’s what I think too.” He watched a knot of their people at the bar. They had clustered around the woman from Accounting, one of their first recruits. She broke out of the crowd and hustled over to him.
Her eyes shown bright in the bar’s subdued lighting. “It may be nothing, but Tran Cam just fed us pictures of the right type of Italian bike in Los Angeles. There were two people riding it.”
“Doesn’t sound like ‘nothing’ to me. Sure about the motorcycle make?”
The woman nodded, her face radiant. Thomas clapped his hands for attention, “Everyone across the road and upstairs! Let’s watch this play out together.”
***
Robko and Sibyl lay tight together in their rehabilitated motel room, spooned up. He said, “I’m going to miss this place.”
She did her best to distract him; she moved her buttocks very slightly, very slowly. “You would, gozo. Most people would be glad to move out. But what do you mean? Are we going right away?”
“Got to move back east if we’re going after O’Brien. Tomorrow we’ll go down and clean ‘Steve Gordon’ out and close his account. After that, I’ll introduce you to the Moth. Great guy.”
She glanced over her shoulder at him. “He didn’t sound all that appealing when you described him.”
“He’ll be appealing enough when you buy legit I.D. from him.”
“When do you want to leave?”
He slid his hand under the sheet and hitched it up around their shoulders. “Need to pack, rent a closed trailer for the bike, and throw a lot of
our stuff in the dumpster. Lots of work. Day after tomorrow?”
“Okay by me. The sooner the better. Do we have to go through Utah? It’s so boring and hot.”
He dropped his head to nuzzle at the back of her neck. His voice was a little muffled. “Afraid so. We take the southern route this time. We’re pointed at this place in Georgia. ” He tolled through the towns, “Vegas, Salt Lake, Dallas, Atlanta. Depending on how it goes, Charlotte, Baltimore, New York.”
“Vegas. I’ve always dreamed of Vegas. So trashy.”
“You drive, I’ll cruze, and I’ll know what I want to do by the time we arrive.”
“Planning on one of those mystic shaman dreams?”
Reaching up to stroke her temple, he said, “Chemically induced of course.”
“Where will we stay in the City?”
“One of the luxury residence hotels, just for you. We’ll have new names. We’re flush; we’re swimming in bond money. Upper Manhattan, near the Park?”
“Good clubbing up near Harlem. Hey, stop that. That’s kind of private space you’re probing there.”
“Hmph. Early morning jimber. Purely accidental.”
“Well, you could at least apologize.”
“I’ve got a better idea.”
***
The team clustered in their conference space, buzzing away. IT brought up the Tran Cam recordings on the giant screen. They all stared at the Italian bike, in its crimson red with custom white splash, tinged in blue, color that swept back over the fairings. “This is sighting number one, as they rode out of east L.A. A man and a woman for certain, but the first shots don’t give us much more. I’ll show you all the additional tracking, but it will help you to know they’re headed to the beach.” He showed them a variety of shots from different angles and places. They were able to get a good view of the bike, but the two riders wore helmets and nondescript clothes. “You probably picked up that we were wrong about Zlata—he is lazy. He still has a New York plate on the bike.” Thomas heard a heavy sigh in the room as someone regretted all those hours sorting through DMV data feeds, searching new registrations. “Here’s the beach. They parked about a hundred feet from the surveillance camera.” He showed video and separated out three freeze frames. The camera revealed the couple as they parked, removed helmets, and rambled towards the sand. The man faced the wrong way the entire time.
The Big Wheel Page 19