by J. A. Marley
“Crash, crash, crash.” Game on, he thought as he flushed the little radio down the toilet.
As he exited, he pulled the brim of his baseball cap down a little lower, making sure his sunglasses were still firmly in place. Walking fast, he scanned the congregation until he saw the face he was looking for. It was also wearing a baseball cap with a cross on, sunglasses and a white ‘I Love JESUS’ T-shirt.
Danny nodded. The other man nodded back. It was about to kick off.
34
Organised Chaos
Returning to his seat in the congregation, Danny nudged Ciaran, who turned to look at him through identical sunglasses. “I can’t believe you did it.”
“Wha’?”
“Shaved off the beard. I’m not sure what was brighter, your mad ginger hair or your whiter than white chin… Jesus.”
“Feck off! I’m strawberry blonde.”
“Oh, and by the way. It’s about to become interesting in here. Hold on to your hat.”
“Have I ever told ye? Yer great craic to work wit’. I insist on only working jobs with ye from now on.”
“Don’t go soft on me, Irish. I’m going to need the tough version of you in the next forty-five minutes.” Danny winked at his friend, feeling ready, confident.
Which was just as well.
Rusty the DJ adjusted his baseball cap and made his way along his row. Danny had given him the nod, so it was his turn to start the fun. His stomach was full of butterflies, but he had to admit he was looking forward to messing with this event. “Fucking self-righteous, pain in the ass Christians.” Ever since his mother had forced him to church as a child, he had detested the idea of religion. To him, it felt like a set of rules that spoilt your fun. Not today. Today, he was going to start the fun… big time.
He made his way towards the very middle of the big room, aiming for where the sound and light booth sat. On the altar, Vincent and June Cardell were talking with a guest preacher, swapping theories about how the bible was the only book a home needed. The timing was perfect. Rusty knew that whilst they were preaching, it would be easier to distract the technician. If the band had been playing… a whole different matter.
He reached the barrier that separated the sound and light booth out from the congregation, circling around it until he found the gap that allowed the tech guys to come and go. Rusty mounted the single step into the booth, the techie standing with his back to him. Rusty cleared his throat loudly.
“Hey, buddy… buddy…”
The tech turned.
Rusty smiled. “Do you believe in Jesus, like the rest of this crowd?”
“Praise be, I do, pilgrim, but you need to sit down.”
“Pray with me… just for a second, friend.”
Rusty knelt down on one knee, his head bowed. The tech hesitated, glanced at the altar and figured they weren’t about to burst into song any moment. He then made the mistake of taking to a knee alongside Rusty.
The Vipertek VTS-989 is a particularly nasty but effective little bit of kit. It’s a handheld stun gun that can produce a ferocious burst of electricity with just a flick of the switch and a pull on the trigger. Its manufacturers claim it can deliver up to fifty-three million volts. It also has a flashlight and is rechargeable. Rusty liked it. He liked the fact that it fitted into his jeans pocket, and he really liked it when he touched it to the tech guy’s midriff and worked the trigger.
As the sound tech, without any sense of irony, cried out for Jesus Christ and collapsed unconscious in a heap on the floor of the booth, Rusty went to work. He found a laptop beside a stack of sound equipment, scanned it for an input USB, which he found within seconds. He quickly jammed in a little blue pen slot, waiting for what seemed like an eternity for it to then open a window on the computer screen. The tech guy was mumbling at his feet, starting to come round.
The laptop screen showed a window. The pen drive had loaded. Rusty scanned the myriad faders on the sound desk in front of him. Each are connected to a different sound source. If you wanted the source to become louder, you pushed the fader away from you. Quieter? Pull it towards you. Helpfully, and Rusty had been banking on this, most sound technicians label their different faders with a chinagraph pencil. This meant that if a microphone malfunctioned or a musical instrument started to feedback, it would be easy to isolate the problem and turn it off. Rusty scanned the rows of faders until he found the one marked laptop. He pushed it all the way to ten, then turned back to the computer. Using the touch pad on there, he double clicked an icon on his pen drive window. A music MP3 file appeared. He right clicked that and selected the word ‘play’. His work was almost done.
He turned and gave the tech guy another jolt from the Vipertek. This one was received with a moan and another collapse. Rusty reckoned the dude was good and out cold for at least three to four minutes. More than enough time. Especially when he heard the scream. It wasn’t from anybody in the congregation. It was from the music that he had started playing.
A scream followed by a thumping bass drum line. Anyone who loved their music and loved it raunchy could recognise Prince’s hymn to hot, sweaty sex. Gett Off boomed out across all the speakers and over the heads of the devout Christians in the conference hall.
Rusty ran his finger over the chinagraph writing across the entire top row of faders, making it difficult to remember which one pertained to the laptop and then did what Danny had told him. “Get the fuck out of there.”
Danny and the dancers from Woody’s had chosen the track mainly for two reasons. Firstly, the scream at the start was such an unmistakeable and clear sound, it would act perfectly as a cue for action. Secondly, they found the thought of such a sexually charged song was simply too deliciously funny to ignore.
As soon as the scream sounded and the drum kicked in, the dancers leapt from their seats in the main congregation and sprinted towards the altar. The sudden change of the audio pace in the room caught the security guards by surprise. Puzzlement was their initial reaction; not really knowing why the hell the funky tune had drowned out a discussion of how Darwin’s “Origin of The Species” was purely a work of evil. By the time they suspected something was up, they were too late to stop what happened next.
The huge black gay guy, the tall transvestite and the eight blondes had all stormed onto the altar. They were, of course, all wearing the baseball caps, sunglasses and hats that Danny had given them. What they were wearing underneath all that and their jeans was another matter entirely.
To the incessant beat of the Prince song, they shed their clothes, save the glasses and hats. The group were a blur of stockings, suspenders, peephole bras and nipple pasties.
Vincent, June and the guest preacher could do nothing but stare in disbelief at first – the bacchanalian scene unfolding in front of them was too surreal to compute.
At first, the security guards tried to physically remove them, but the tall cross-dresser and his imposing black friend simply batted the guards away. They continued to shed clothes, until it was obvious the transvestite was a pre-op and his mate fulfilled every stereotype about the African American male you had ever heard.
The girls were doing their bit, too. Three of them were writhing in a steamy clinch while two more were trying to seduce the guards who were unsure as to how best tackle women wearing flimsy lingerie and wicked smiles.
The congregation were in uproar. Some women were covering their husband’s eyes, others wondered if you really could have twenty-two positions in a one-night stand, like the song said. Some of the younger men in the building were tutting furiously whilst not being able to drag their eyes away from the debauched tableau in front of them.
The sound tech was struggling to stand up in the booth. He knew something weird was going on, and at the back of his addled brain somewhere, he vaguely knew that he needed to stand up and put something right. But at the moment, for the life of him, he couldn’t grasp what.
Security also knew they were collectively missing some i
mportant point as they grappled with how best to stop the happy band of strippers on the altar, until someone yelled into their radios, “The preachers! Protect the preachers!”
Four security personnel stopped tussling with the scantily clad stage invaders and made a bee-line for Vincent, June and their guest, bundling them away from the dancers who were now gathered in a circle, can-canning their way through what was left of the track, all G-strings, bouncing boobs and balls gyrating in time to the music.
And whilst this was going on, no one noticed. Not a single human being spotted the two men wearing baseball caps and sunglasses, one of them carrying a small backpack, making their way to the side of the hall to a door that was marked “Staff Only”.
“This is where we make our leap of faith.” Danny nervously reached into his pocket and brought out a small plastic card which he held against a larger square of plastic on the frame of the door. For a second, nothing. Ciaran was holding his breath. Danny could hear his heartbeat. It was suddenly loud and fast in his own ears. And just as Prince was declaring that “Tonight, you’re a star… and I’m the big dipper,” they both heard a click, and Danny put his weight against the door. It opened and through they went.
“Jaysus. We’re in this far…”
Back on the altar, the guards had managed to corral the dancers, slowly pushing them to one side, while the preachers had been safely shepherded to another door that led to the backstage area. They had made it to “safety”.
Just before the chaos had erupted out in the auditorium, Greg Norby was in his seat in the security hub of the Convention Centre. Banks of TV screens displayed every possible angle of the property, and when he saw three black Escalades arrive at a personnel entrance at the rear of the arena, he was instantly on guard.
“I’ll be back in a minute, keep your focus on the auditorium.”
‘Yes, sir.”
He grabbed a portable walkie-talkie from a charging bank by the door and made his way to the personnel door that led into the building. Was this it? Was this the start of the robbery he knew his boss wanted and had allowed to be planned? He had a bad feeling. It was the stupidest plan he had ever heard. He had tried to urge Vincent to cut some sort of a deal with Ines Zedillo. With people like her, there was always a price. Equally, there was always a deal to be done. But Vincent was too focussed. Too single-minded to be deflected from his political ambitions and his hunger for power.
Norby hurried through the maze of service corridors as quickly as he could, expecting to encounter the thieves. But it wasn’t until he was nearly at the door he’d seen the group enter through on camera that he came face to face with them. But it wasn’t who he was expecting. Where was the tall, good-looking Brit? No sign of the crazy little Irishman. Instead he was standing in front of six Latino men and a tall, shaven-headed man who was busying himself spray-painting over the lens of a security camera. When he turned, Greg noticed two things. First the man was holding a white security key card, one which had given them access to the building. And second, the tall man had a mangled eye, it looked like ruined boiled egg in its socket.
“Who the hell are you?”
“We, my dear friend, are here to see your bosses. And you are their security manager, are you not?”
“Not another Brit…”
“Yes, another fucking Brit. But this one is grateful. You’ve saved me the job of hunting for you.”
Norby’s face went white with terror as he saw the man with the horrible eye produce a pistol with a very long silencer on the end of it. He heard the slap of it being fired just milliseconds before feeling the round hit him square in the chest. Norby fell to his knees, his hands reaching towards his heart, not able to catch a breath.
Harkness bent down over the stricken man. “I heard you didn’t like any of our plans. I heard you told Vincent we were trouble. Matey boy, at least you now know how right you were.”
And then, he shot him twice in the head, the corridor filling with the smell of cordite and burning flesh.
“Right, let’s get on, chaps. We’ve business to conduct.”
As they were eventually hurried through the door to the backstage area, Vincent was having trouble concealing his excitement. He had realised almost immediately that the madness erupting on his altar had to be connected to the robbery. June’s Englishman had evidently embarked on his plan. But Vincent’s excitement was to be short-lived.
Having made their way to safety, they were immediately confronted with a group of seven armed men. The security guards who had helped them off the altar didn’t know quite what to do next, one of them reaching for his radio, on the verge of asking the control room what next.
But one of the seven armed men stepped forward. “It’s okay, gentlemen, we are part of Mr and Mrs Cardell’s elite security team. We can take them from here. If you could escort the other preacher to his dressing room until we get a security all clear.”
Vincent was about to protest, but June spoke across him. “What are you doing here, Harkness? Why are you even here?”
“Oh, June. You had to speak out of turn.”
Harkness calmly raised his silenced gun and shot first the guest preacher and two of the security guards without a moment’s hesitation. The other armed men finished the job, their silenced guns filling the air with oily smoke as they did so.
Vincent instantly went into panic. He couldn’t believe that he’d just witnessed the death of a fellow preacher and four guards. His eyes were wide. Was this part of the robbery plan? He’d never envisaged the killing of a fellow preacher. He thought it would have been much cleaner. And how did his wife know this man with the putrid looking eye? He glanced down at the corpses, the blood leaking from them causing him to involuntarily lick his lips.
June spoke again. “What the fuck are you doing, Harkness? For Christ’s sake…”
“Is it for Christ’s sake, June? I thought this was all about dirty money, sweetheart. Let’s get going. Ms Zedillo is expecting you both…”
And those were the words that made Vincent’s guts twist and his heart skip at least ten beats.
35
The Good Lord Provides
Danny and Ciaran found themselves in front of the first keypad door. It would give them access to the money tunnel. From there, it was a straight shot to the administration offices and the counting room in the basement.
It was another hold-your-breath moment. Had they been given the right codes? Had they been sold down the river? Had the discovery of Marvin Quantick III’s dalliance with Anastasia the masseuse been a defining moment? Because it was Marvin who was the security co-ordinator for the Miami Urban Convention Centre. He had given them the keycards and the passcode for the doors. It was Marvin who had parted with the information in return for silence about his louche lunchtimes.
Ciaran reached out to the keypad. Carefully, he punched in the numbers. Zero. Seven. Seven. Nine. Nine. A little light on the front of the pad had been solid red until the last nine was pressed. It flashed red twice then turned green. The door clicked. It was open.
“Jaysus, Marvin… yer some boy…”
Danny put his hand out to stop Ciaran. “Hold on a second. If we go in there now, there’s no way out. We could be sealed in. They could lock us in place. The door closes, the code at the other end is changed and at this end, too. We could be trapped. Marvin might just have us.”
Ciaran’s expression clouded. “Ah, feck, Danny. Why’d ye have to say that out loud? He was shite scared when I braced him. I had him convinced. If he fucked wit’ us, his wife… ye know…” Ciaran ran a finger across his throat.
“Yes, but he’s had time. What if he was wracked by guilt? Came clean to his missus? He could have spilled to his bosses. They are the only link in the chain we’ve not covered. He doesn’t work for the Cardells, nor the Mexicans.” Danny was appalled. He’d let a ball drop. He’d failed to spot a weak link in the process. Never mind the fact that everyone was expecting a different plan. H
e’d broken one of his own rules. Cover every single fucking angle.
The two friends stared at each other for a second longer. It was Ciaran who broke the silence.
“I’d just as well be hung for sheep as a lamb. We’ve come this far together. This is what we do. We take risks. Aye, we minimise them, but let’s be feckin’ real here. We love takin’ dem… don’t we?”
“Tell me again why I chose to work with a crazy Irishman? Let’s go.”
They pushed through the door. Before they let it close, Ciaran reached into his backpack. He pulled out a Smith and Wesson Sigma 40V. Danny was impressed. He’d not seen the gun before. It had a composite frame topped by a stainless-steel slide. The gun looked hardcore. Ciaran steadied the door with his foot.
“Get back a wee second, Danny.”
Raising the gun in one hand and shielding his face with his arm, Ciaran fired. The explosion was ear-splitting, especially when combined with the bullet mashing into the lock mechanism on the door.
“They can fecking try and lock us in now.”
“And they know we’re coming.”
“Sure, feck it. We were gonna show up anyway.”
They sprinted to the other end of the tunnel, knowing the gunshot meant they needed to get the hell on with it. Marvin had been scared. The same code that had opened the other end of the tunnel worked at this end, too.
Ciaran had his gun out. Danny was carrying another Vipertek stun gun, like the one Rusty had used earlier. It took Danny’s eyes a few seconds to adjust, such was the brilliance of the white neon strip lighting overhead.
Ciaran’s radical door policy had been a blessing and curse. The staff who had been working in the counting room had all backed away to the far end, away from the door. Danny quickly took stock, counting six people in there, two women and four men. The curse came in the shape of one of the men pointing a gun straight at them.