Ruthless (Out of the Box Book 3)

by Robert J. Crane

  “Acclimating to the town, I see,” Reed said, the perpetual smartass.

  “When in Rome,” I said, “break everything possible and try and get yourself kicked off the continent.” I snapped him a grin. “Oh, wait, that’s you.”

  “You get banned by one massive continental parliamentary government and nobody ever lets you forget it,” Reed grumbled.

  “Yeah, it’s kinda like you and this constant bitching about a surveillance state,” I said. “Just submit your emails and your rectum to probing or throw away your cell phone, live like a Luddite and stop griping, will you?”

  “Har har,” Reed said as we crossed the street, following Lt. Welch into the massive entrance of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “You laugh now, but—”

  “Just stop,” I said, shaking my head. “Put your game face on.”

  “I’ve always wondered what a game face looks like,” Reed mused. “You know, not being a sports fan.”

  “Probably not like an O face,” I said, deploying something I’d been saving for a special occasion, “though I suppose we’d have to ask Dr. Perugini if the two are similar in your case.”

  The shocked expression was worth it. “How did you know?” he asked.

  “That you’ve been getting far more regular check-ups than our insurance pays for?” I smirked. “It’s been, like, years. Does she make you turn your head and cough every time, or—”

  “Later,” he said, and I knew that was a promise he wasn’t going to keep. Not that I really wanted to hear about it, or I would have dropped the fact that I knew a lot earlier.

  We breezed into a massive lobby, all marble and granite, opulence and wealth. You could tell the place was money just by looking at the entry. A guy in a suit nervously flapped about near the entrance, fumbling and fidgeting, with a flop sweat on his hair and overlong brow that proclaimed him to be the most nervous nelly in New York at the moment. Of course, he was the head of security at a bank that was about to be robbed, and with a fifth of a trillion dollars in his care, I could imagine being a little nervous if I were in his place.

  “Lt. Welch,” Corey Fairbine said, about two steps from wringing his hands as he waved us through the metal detectors, “Ms. Nealon, Mr. Treston.” He acknowledged each of us in turn, and I imagined his teeth chattering when he stopped speaking. Not from the cold, but from adrenaline. The guy had been a perfect example of a nervous chatterer the day or so I’d known him, and he was not improving as we got closer to zero hour.

  Hopefully he’d settle down once this deal was done. “Mr. Fairbine,” I said, answering for the three of us, “is everything set?”

  “Our security teams are in position with the NYPD SWAT team,” Fairbine said, like he was about to go to prom and his fly wouldn’t close. “I still want to express my discomfort at this notion. The scheme could have been broken up two days ago, the conspirators arrested—”

  “We still don’t have the last conspirator,” I said. “The biggest, I might add. The brains behind the operation.” Whoever was giving Eric Simmons his orders had been pretty shy. We suspected it was a female, but it could have been a boyfriend for all we knew. Simmons had been watched for days, but he was pretty brilliant at disappearing, evading even our surveillance, which was troubling considering he supposedly didn’t know he was being watched.

  That meant his “brain” was really smart, because everything we knew about Simmons told us he was dumber than a box of rocks.

  “Never heard of a shy brain before,” Reed said as we followed Fairbine down the stairs toward the vaults. He walked with a hitch in his stride, and I wondered where the man had got it; he didn’t look like he’d hold up well in combat, so I discounted the military. “Shy kidneys, but not a shy brain.”

  “You’d think that’d make it more difficult to produce thoughts while being watched,” Welch said, his attempt at a joke. Welch wasn’t funny, but he tried.

  We worked our way down the stairwell. The building was old, but had been refurbished a lot. Tons of surveillance cameras everywhere. I hadn’t been to the ladies’ room, but there was probably one in every stall. I suspected the vault was laden with more than its fair share of them as well, which had me wondering what our criminals were planning to do to bring that particular obstacle down. I voiced this thought to Fairbine.

  He shook as he answered. “If they’re able to create earthquakes all around the island of Manhattan, I don’t imagine it’d be terribly difficult to shake our cameras off the wall.” Good point, Nelly.

  Fairbine opened the first vault door to us with a key card, exposing a half dozen NYPD uniforms in the waiting area outside the main vault. Welch and his boys had called us in on this gig after they’d tracked a string of bank robberies that were just a little too good for an ordinary criminal to have pulled off. His analysis, not mine. I don’t deal with normal criminals. The common thread had been seismic events, teeth-rattling earthquakes at the site of each robbery, vibrations that opened vaults and broke through walls like a rock star cracked through the brittle reserve of an excitable groupie.

  Which is where my brother and I came into the picture. Man-made earthquakes that were actually made by a man? Sounded like a metahuman at work. Two days on the scene with Rocha and the rest of our crew and we’d narrowed our search to lower Manhattan. Another day and we’d found Eric Simmons and his basement hideaway. A little digging on our part (not literal) and we’d figured out their plan. After all, a group of bank-robbing criminals probably don’t rent out the basement suite across from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York because they’re genuinely interested in locating their mail-order business there. I mean, we ordered some of the sticky-tack from their website just in case, but I wasn’t holding my breath on that order being fulfilled, since J.J. back at headquarters had gotten us access to satellite imaging which had shown us their tunnel pretty clearly.

  Fairbine opened the second vault to us, passing through biometrics that scanned his retina and all five fingers. He’d walked us through the security measures when we’d approached him, and I realized pretty quickly that Simmons’s approach to the vault was unique, if not ingenious. He’d been setting off seismic sensors around Manhattan for months, forcing even the most hardened, logical of seismologists to question whether there might have been something they’d missed below the bedrock of the island. They all swore up and down that if there was going to be an earthquake on Manhattan, it’d have to be a lot broader based than the small quakes that had been rattling the hell out of the island.

  Ergo, someone was messing with them. Someone who could create earthquakes.

  The second vault door opened up, and I looked upon a sight of beautiful gold, filling cages as far as I could see. Okay, it wasn’t sprawlingly huge, like a warehouse, exactly, but it was pretty big. The gold bars gleamed in the light, too, in a way that they never really did on TV or in the movies. These were actual shiny metals (oooh, shiny!) instead of dull painted bricks, and that gave them a luster that caught this girl’s attention. And not just mine.

  There should be a diamond storage, Eve Kappler said in my head. That combined with this would be … glorious. I’d never taken her for a gold and jewels type. You think you know someone, just because they’re living in your head …

  Fairbine had told me that each of them weighed twenty-eight pounds, and the workers had to wear special shoes when they moved them. You know, in case someone dropped one on their foot. Because that sort of thing could put a real damper on your weekend games of lacrosse.

  I felt a low rumble and looked across the room to the far end, where we were reasonably sure they were going to come in. There were a dozen guys waiting, both nervous security personnel from the bank as well as NYPD SWAT, and while they didn’t have their fingers on the trigger, you could tell there was a gameday atmosphere. This was probably going to be the single biggest, gutsiest robbery attempt on the place ever—and certainly the closest to succeeding. I mean, it’s probably gonna sound like a hu
mbrag, but they totally would have gotten away with it if not for us meddling kids.

  “Everybody ready?” Welch asked, the consummate professional. I hadn’t asked him, but I was pretty sure he was so gung-ho because he was getting to ride shotgun on this and get a lot of the glory for it. Most of the crew we were about to take down was human, after all, and they all had the rap sheets of professional criminals. He’d make a nice name for himself on this one, stand out front at the press conference while Reed and I vamoosed back to Minnesota without being heard from at the event.

  I was going to get the dregs—Eric Simmons, and maybe his mastermind, if they turned out to be a meta. Simmons was no prize, but the collar would be nice. He wouldn’t be able to be imprisoned in a normal place, like Riker’s Island, after all. He’d have to go where—well, where metas go.

  Once again, that was my department.

  My job.

  Blocks were moving at the back end of the vault. Fairbine assured us that the place was normally empty at this hour, which was probably why the thieves had chosen this moment to make their entry. Morning rounds had concluded, the next patrol would be a little bit off yet. A subtle rumble ran through the vault again, and the lights flickered.

  Showtime, Roberto Bastian said in my mind. Always the tactical thinker, that one.

  I strode out in front of Fairbine, who suddenly looked a little weak in the knees. I could feel my brother a little behind me. By unspoken agreement, I always went first. Not only because I was more suited to sponging up bullets, but because I was easily the better person to beat the ass off whoever we faced. Better, faster, stronger. Reed knew it and he didn’t make a fuss about it, which was good, because I wouldn’t have enjoyed beating him into a pulp just to prove a point. Don’t mess with little sister. She will eff you up.

  Bricks shifted in the wall ahead of me, high above a stack of gold bars. Fairbine had informed me that the vault wall had been reinforced last year, but that this had gone unmentioned in any public forum. We assumed our criminals would be a little behind schedule because of this fact, but as I heard the rattle of concrete hitting the floor, I knew they’d punched through on time. Taken by itself, it hinted to me that the brains of this operation had known about the reinforcement.

  Smart brain. I couldn’t wait to knock it senseless.

  I could hear the faint noises of jubilation over the high-pitched whine of the drill they were using, the sounds of a bunch of crooks that were about to get a hell of a surprise.

  “Clear!” came the shout from within the cage ahead. The drill powered down, whine dying to a whimper in a second. I couldn’t see it very well behind a stack of gold bullion that went over my head. I heard guys coming in through the hole in the wall, expressing their low admiration for the stack of bricks that was obscuring their view of what lay beyond.

  I glanced back and saw that the SWAT team had taken cover, along with the security guys, behind the gold stacked around the room. Reed stayed with them, peering out from behind a shiny pile just behind me, reflected light gleaming next to his face. I tiptoed up to the bullion, stacked about seven feet high, and wondered if anyone considered what a safety hazard that was. I considered just shoving it over onto the crooks and calling it a day, but decided that no, that probably wasn’t sporting.

  “Holy hell, man!” came the clearest voice from behind the pile. It wasn’t a thin stack, either, it ran about eight feet long and three feet deep. Just lifting the contents of this one stack would make our criminals a wealthy bunch, and there were a lot more piles than this one, divided out by country. “Look at all this!”

  “Cameras,” came a calm, clipped voice from nearer by the hole. I had my back to the bullion stack, waiting for my moment and trying to identify by sound how many of them there were. I gently pushed the button on my earpiece that activated my hands-free mike.

  “I’m on it, don’t get your panties in a twist,” came a relaxed voice that I knew came from Eric Simmons. I’d gotten used to the sound of his voice from listening in on his cell phone calls. He had a manner of speaking that was—how do I put it? He sounded like a cross between a surfer dude and a locker-room douchebag. When he was on the phone with his buddies, it was a constant series of profane discussions about the attributes of various women—celebrities, old acquaintances, some woman he just catcalled on the street. For a man with a supposed girlfriend—or boyfriend—he was a pretty dirty boy.

  I heard the sound of a single bar being lifted off the top of the pile, and the straining that followed told me that it was a human doing the lifting. “Man … this alone is worth half a million bucks.”

  I love it when some assclown sets me up. I slipped out, all demure and sweet (totally an act, obviously) and said, “Then you can afford to buy me a drink.” I waited for a moment in the shocked silence that followed and said, lowering my voice to a throaty whisper, “Hello, sailors.”

  “Aw, shit,” one of the guys in back said, “that’s Sienna Nealon.”

  “Got it in one,” I said, and I saw a guy in black work clothes pulling a gun, thinking he was covered behind his buddy. I snatched a brick of bullion off the stack and chucked it right at his head. It hit him dead on, and the sounds of skull cracking silenced them all. Bullseye, Wolfe said helpfully, glorying in my act of violence. He did that.

  “You killed him!” One of the guys said, a dude in a boiler suit that was covered in dirt. I had him pegged as the drill operator.

  “Yep,” I said, “he’s deader than Chester A. Arthur.” (What? Too soon?) “Hands in the air, the NYPD is here to collect you boys. The prize for winning in this listening contest is that your brains will remain inside your heads. The loser gets …” I made a faint gesture toward the giant, blood-spattered elephant in the room. “Well, you know.”

  Hands went into the air, guns were lowered and gently dropped. I watched the whole thing, keeping my eye on the hole the entire time. I could see the faint movement inside it, of course, and knew that Eric Simmons had slipped away like the rat I already knew he was.

  Now it was just a matter of waiting, and letting him lead us back to the brains of his operation.

  3.

  Eric Simmons

  Eric slipped through the tunnel, quietly as he could. Did she know he was here? She was still talking, issuing orders to the other guys. He knew her face, of course. Everybody did.

  Sienna fricking Nealon. Maybe she knew there was something going on here, that metas were involved somehow, but she couldn’t know who he was, could she? Of course not.

  He crawled quietly along the tunnel, keeping his head down. He’d seen Ed get the brick, watched his skull smash like an empty soda can as the liquid came spraying out, and he had about zero desire to follow in his footsteps. He kept one hand on the ground at all times, ready to trigger a Richter event if he had to, bring the tunnel down. He kept a listen for that brassy voice. She was a loud one, and that made it all the easier to know that she wasn’t following him.

  Eric made it out of the tunnel and staggered, almost unconsciously wiping the dirt off his jeans. They knew he and the boys were going to come out of that exact place? Or did they just know they were going to hit the vault now? Could be either, which meant that they could have cops stationed at the building exits. If they didn’t already.

  But that was okay, because Cassidy had given him a plan for that. She had a plan for almost everything. Except what to do if the Queen of Meta Policing in the entire U.S. suddenly met him on the other end of the vault hole. That had not been covered.

  Eric was scrambling, ripping off his jacket and ditching it, leaving the dusty thing behind. His jeans were still a mess; there was nothing to do about that. His beanie was a mess, too, but he needed it if he was going to go outside without his jacket. He tucked his long hair underneath it as he stumbled out the door and up the stairwell, listening for any sign he might be followed, or that someone might be lurking ahead.

  Nothing.

  He leaped, jumping in a pe
rfectly balanced spring up to the landing above, then leaped again to the one above. He paused there, listened again.

  Nothing.

  If they were here, they were covering the exits, then. It wasn’t a small building, after all; there was a lot to cover. Eric sprinted eight flights, then leapt the last two. He found the door to the roof locked and smashed it. As tenants, they’d been given a key, but he didn’t have it on him right now.

  The snow was gently falling and the sound of New York was in the air. Traffic below was moving, all background noise. He hurried over to the small chimney and grabbed the backpack he’d left out there on the first day, brushing the snow off as he unzipped it. He changed into the black suit he’d stored inside it. He paused to put his Bluetooth in his ear, then snugged the suit tight, pushing the hood down and putting the glasses over it. He was hitting the button to call Cassidy before he even finished.

  4.

  Sienna

  I was keeping a careful eye on the arrest as the NYPD guys clapped every one of the surviving thieves in durable, meta-proof irons (just in case) when Kelly Harper’s voice came in through my earpiece: “We’ve got a problem.”

  “Go,” I said, aiming for cool. Reed shook his head in my peripheral vision, telling me I did not quite make it. Eager schoolgirl, that’s me. I didn’t get a chance to do fun things like this nearly often enough. Most of the time we were just training and doing scut work, chasing possible metas that never panned out.

  “I’ve got movement on the roof across the way,” Harper said. I knew she was watching the scene through her drone’s camera at five thousand feet, but it still kind of creeped me out how she could eye in the sky it like that. “Looks like a guy in a wingsuit.”