Capel headed back to New York, arranging for more clean ops to spread a net behind us when we hit the power plant. He and I had worked out a plan to keep the team under surveillance, hoping that whoever had sent the mangled motorcyclist would have more fresh bodies to toss into the fray. The cell phone we’d recovered had proved less than helpful. It had been used to receive two calls, both from telephone booths. The phones were in Alexandria and Reston, suburbs of Washington in Virginia. In both cases, the booths were convenient to highways but were not located anywhere near the route I had taken. The account had been opened up with a credit card that ostensibly belonged to a seventy-three-year-old woman in Portland, Oregon, who, until Capel called her, had no idea that her identity had been pinched. He ruined her night and probably the rest of her month by informing her that the thieves had gotten hold of her Social Security number as well. The credit card he’d traced had only been used to buy the cell phone, and Capel suspected that it had been purchased from a cell phone number broker specifically for that purpose. But according to the credit report in front of him, her information had been used to open several other accounts, all of which had large balances in arrears. He offered to help the victim tag her accounts so that they could be watched for any other illegal activity. She readily agreed—a good thing, since Capel had already gone ahead and started the process, checking on the accounts and setting up a net to tell him whether the woman’s Social Security number or even her address was used to establish a new account anywhere over the next month or so.
The phone calls had been made while I was in the Homeland Insecurity building. Capel concluded that there had been a much larger team keeping tabs on me that his people had somehow missed. He seriously doubted that the kid who had died was the only person who had been shadowing us. I usually take what Dan Capel says as Bible, but in this particular case, I disagreed. Certainly someone had been running this kid, but as far as trailing me, it seemed obvious that he had been working alone. If he’d been part of a team, he would have been more careful when I stopped at the McDonald’s. If he had had backup, he either would have handed me off right away or toughed it out and gone right into the restaurant. He’d gone down the road and hid rather than taking the easier play and parking across the street in the Burger King lot. To me, that meant he was worried that he had been spotted—or would be. If he had had a team at that point, he would have zipped off.
I also thought it meant he was an amateur, or, if a pro, operating in very constrained circumstances.
If I was right, that suggested several things. For one thing, it meant my shadow had only a small group at his command; he couldn’t afford to run even two cars. It also probably meant that, at this stage, Shadow was still roughing out my routine. A single tail following at a distance was useful for getting an overall notion of a subject’s habits without committing all your resources to the project.
Losing the motorcyclist was the first hit Shadow had taken. How he would react would be interesting.
How would I have reacted? By not changing a thing—or at least not appearing to.
“You know why they blew up that ATM in Illinois?” Capel asked when I drove him to the airport the day after the party.
“I’m guessing it wasn’t because they were mad at being charged a buck and a half to take their own money out of their accounts.”
“Probably not,” Capel said. “They wanted to get your attention. It’s totally personal.”
“I realize that. The question is: why didn’t they shoot me then when they had their chance? It’s only going to get harder.”
“Maybe they couldn’t.”
“If they could get close enough in Iowa to take the picture of me, then they could have shot me as well.”
“Not necessarily. It’s easier to move around with a camera, even one with a long-range lens, than with a sniper rifle.”
“Maybe. But I think the goal isn’t to kill me—not yet. They want to play with me a bit. Then they’ll take me down.”
“Like a cat with a mouse or a mole he catches in the yard,” said Capel.
I’ve never been compared to a mouse before. Unfortunately, the comparison seemed appropriate.
*The publisher’s asshole lawyers made me use a pseudonym. What a bunch of dork shits.
Chapter
7
The bartender gave me one of those scowls usually reserved for politicians trying to grab money from your wallet.
“You look familiar,” he said, plopping his Popeye arms down on the bar top.
“Maybe I arrested you,” I told him.
He hesitated long enough to show that might indeed be a possibility, then gave me a hockey-player grin—one of the incisors on the top right of his mouth was gone—and retrieved my Bud Lite. The Squat & Stomp wasn’t the sort of place where you ordered Bombay Sapphire without being noticed. In fact, they didn’t seem to have anything in the small pyramid of finer beverages near the cash register that one might call top shelf—or bottom shelf, either. It didn’t matter. I hadn’t come to drink.
I laid out a ten-dollar bill and got real change back. I hid my surprise behind the beer and slid around on the barstool, taking stock of the place. A TV tuned to ESPN sat over the door at the end of the serving area. The smell of a small Shih Tzu being fried wafted in from beyond, though no one in the place looked as if they’d come to eat.
Three guys in their late twenties worked a puck-bowl machine near the door. They blew reverently on the puck before tossing it, as if their spit had magical properties. A trio of men in their early seventies held down the far end of the bar to my right, each gaunter and whiter than the other. They took their drinking very seriously, meticulously raising their half-filled glass steins to their lips, frowning slightly at the bitterness, and then bringing the glasses down in slow motion. The men didn’t say anything, and all three stared straight ahead.
About a dozen guys and three women were scattered around the rest of the bar. They wore jeans and T-shirts. Not a tie in the place. My immediate neighbor was a tall, buxom redhead who played with a box of cigarettes as she sipped from a whiskey neat, alternately twirling the box and then a cigarette around in her fingers. Smoking is outlawed in bars in New York, one of those Daddy Knows Best laws that makes it a crime to do something you might actually enjoy without official state sanction. The governor, allegedly a conservative Republican, signed the bill with huge enthusiasm. I guess I’ll never understand why someone who claims to be a conservative thinks it’s fine to stick the government’s nose into other people’s business, but then I don’t claim to understand politics. And, for the record, I’m a nonsmoker. (I only smoke after sex but I don’t look.)
I was about two very slow sips into my beer when the door slammed and in walked a woman with a tank top wrapped tighter around her chest than an ace bandage. It not only accentuated her breasts but gave nice play to her midsection, where it stopped above a tattoo of a coyote snapping at its prey. Her jeans were low enough to give you a good view of the animal’s claws, and from the way she filled the denim it looked like her hips had been hermetically sealed inside. Even the guys at the puck bowl stopped their game as she walked over to the bar.
She held a twenty-dollar bill out toward the bartender, but she’d already gotten his attention.
“Bud with a whiskey shooter,” she said.
Popeye Arms had to pick his tongue up off the floor before he could answer her. The woman leaned forward. “You know a guy named Jimmy Ferro?”
The bartender stared at her cleavage as he responded. “No, ma’am.”
“He works over at Wappino.”
“Lot of people do,” said the bartender.
She frowned at him. “Can I have my drink?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“That pool table over there work?”
“Uh—” Popeye Arms’s brain had become detached from his mouth, and it took a great deal of effort for him to restore the connection. “Think so,” he managed f
inally. “You’ll, uh, need quarters.”
“So give me some, handsome. With my drink.”
You’d have thought she asked him if he was free after work. The poor slob couldn’t hit the keys on the cash register fast enough and then gave her way too much change. She made a point of settling up properly, then slugged the beer and swallowed the shooter. She slammed the whiskey glass down and pushed the beer mug forward.
“Just the beer this time,” she said, taking the quarters over to the pool table.
Seemed to me slamming the glass was a bit much, but I don’t like to critique my minions in the middle of an operation.
Trace—you knew it was her, right? The coyote’s some sort of tribal thing—racked the balls on the table as well as just about every other set of cajones in the place, including those of the three old men. She broke and ran the table with thirteen shots before the bartender finished pouring her the beer.
“Anyone want to play?” she asked, chalking the cue as she walked over for her draft. “Just for fun. No bets.”
Everyone wanted to play, though not necessarily with the bar’s cue sticks. Several guys sauntered over, and eventually two were culled from the pack. One stood about five-four and if he weighed one-ten then I’m touching five hundred pounds. The other wore a mustache that looked like something you’d use to clean the streets. Shorty and Brush Face actually seemed to know what they were doing; each man beat Trace at least once, and even when she ran the table, they seemed in the game until the end.
They were on their fourth beers when Trace asked if they happened to know her friend Ferro. This segued into a long discussion about Wappino. The two men worked there as maintenance people. Trace expressed surprise, though of course she’d already spotted their tags. It would have been difficult to miss Shorty’s, since it was around his neck. Brush Face’s was clipped to his pants pocket.
I’d tell you exactly how she stole them, except that she was so quick I didn’t actually see. I would have guessed a pawand-grope diversion, but Trace was very subtle in her teasing and had the IDs off by the time Brush Face and Shorty realized they were an hour late for dinner and staring at rather frigid evenings with their wives. Had they realized they were missing their badges at that point, they wouldn’t have found them on Trace. She’d already slipped them to me while getting some refills. We made the handoff as I was on my way to the restroom. Before I relieved my bladder I relieved my fingers, putting the badges in a small bag and then tossing them out the window to Sean, waiting outside for the relay. The bar could have been searched for days and the IDs would never have been found.
It wasn’t searched though, and I’d be willing to bet that in Brush Face’s case, at least, he didn’t notice he’d lost his ID until the next morning when he went to go into the plant, if then. Odds were that neither man reported losing his badge, probably making do with temps for the day and planning to tear up the house and car when they went home. They may even have had spares. They had a good incentive not to report that their IDs were gone: losing your ID meant you were docked two hours of pay and charged for the cost of a new one. If you were only making two dollars an hour over minimum wage, that represented a decent hunk of take-home.
Trace’s sip and rip wasn’t the only ID operation, though it was by far the most fun. Hulk and two of the new ops hit a health club about a mile down the highway from Wappino, prowling the locker rooms while some of the power plant workers were turning the treadmills and pushing the weights around. They came up with two IDs. Rather than simply stealing and using those as is, Hulk ripped off the laminate and pasted our pictures over the originals. Then he zipped them through the small laminator tucked into his gym bag. Hulk’s fingers were a little too thick to make the operation a smooth one, but he got the originals resealed and back before being discovered.
This gave us four legitimate magnetic cards allowing access to the entire plant. We ran them through a reader and discovered that the patterns were all the same, making it easy to make counterfeits. This was extra work since we would almost certainly not need the additional tags, but the company was paying for the “event,” and doing it this way would leave them with some souvenirs at the end of our visit. (“Rogue Warrior Blew Up My Nuke Plant And All I Got Was This Lousy ID. And Leukemia.”) Most times that we steal IDs, we simply use the original and thumb over the tiny photo when flashing to a sentry or anyone else who cares to be flashed. You’d think guards would have caught onto the ploy by now, but it still works as easily today as it did ten years ago.
Now, if you’re a careful reader, you’re probably wondering how we knew what the blanks looked like. The blanks were the backs of the tag that included the metal part, and while there wasn’t much artwork involved, we had to know the general design going in. After all, Hulk had blanks with him when he went to the health club, which he left with the two workers.
If you’re well-read, you may know that security IDs only come in a few configurations and generally don’t employ high-tech anticounterfeiting techniques. That’s true, but it still would have meant going in with about a half-dozen cards, and we like to travel light whenever we can. (Never mind the weight of the laminator.) We knew what the tags looked like because we had very detailed photos of them long before we arrived in the area to check out Wappino—photos good enough, in fact, that we could have made IDs from them.
We also had pictures of the plant. Really good pictures of the plant—aerial photos from every angle, along with shots from the river and the land, with enough detail to show not only where the fences and security posts were but also where the vehicles were kept and even where the security cameras were. We had pictures of the insides of all of the important buildings, and enough snaps of guards to tell us who two of the three shift lieutenants were.
No, I hadn’t sent Trace in with a video cam in her navel. I let my fingers do the walking on the Internet at the local library. The plant was extremely controversial. A lot of people don’t want a pile of plutonium in their backyards, and in this case a lot of the people raising the fuss were doctors and lawyers and astrophysicists who lived in the affluent surrounding towns, so their screams carried clout. This clout in turn led the corporation running Wappino to launch a PR campaign that did everything but put a smiley face on the containment vessels.
Actually, a smiley face on the containment vessels would have been a smarter idea. Because, in the course of their PR campaign, they invited one of the local news hounds in to do a feature story. The story made the plant sound like Shangri-La; I have no doubt that a large blowup of the story is hanging on the paneled walls of the corporate dining room. But it also provided us with intelligence that would have taken considerable legwork to obtain. I’m not saying we wouldn’t have gotten it, anyway, but it did allow us to put our resources to better use elsewhere.
Put that one down to corporate stupidity, and the unconsidered dangers of living in a media-saturated world. But the people opposing the plant did their bit to make our intel gathering a snap, too. There were several groups against the plant, each vying with the other to be the voice of the people. One of the loudest managed to obtain a copy of an internal security study completed at the plant just a month before. Almost surely the source was a disgruntled worker, pissed off about a decision to limit overtime at the plant, but I digress. The voice of the people quoted from the report to make its point that the plant was not safe. And then these geniuses scanned a copy of the report into their computers and posted a link on the Internet.
I guess they figured that if some slimebags blew up the plant, it would prove their point.
The report did not give a step-by-step plan for taking down the facility. But it told us how big the force was, what weapons they had, how often they trained, and yada-yada-yada, as the folks in New York say. Reading between the lines, anyone with a brain would know how many people to expect on any given shift, how the force would leapfrog back for ammo, and the like. It took slightly more experience and skill
to deduce the way the security people had been trained, how they were organized, and how they were likely to respond to an emergency—these things were not outlined specifically. Still, even someone with limited mental capacity could have figured out what they were up against.
Or not up against, depending on your perspective.
I will say this one thing: the Hudson River is a beautiful fucking river. Full moon out, nice spring breeze going, few things are going to top the scene. It’s so idyllic you just want to take a sailboat out and cruise gently downriver, rocking along like you have not a care in the world. It’s a river made for sailboats, harmless throwbacks to another era.
Did I say harmless? Well, almost harmless. Harmless except for the three SpecWarriors in black Rogue attire easing into the water just north of the plant. It was a good night for a swim, and the half mile to the power plant dock got us loose. The photos had shown that there was no fence and no video cameras in front of the northern turbine building.
The only difficulty, if you could call it that, was getting past the dock area, which was patrolled by two men with dogs. We’d watched them earlier in the evening, however; the paths they took were confined to the spot-lit area back off the water, and unless you climbed directly over one of the two formal docks and stood directly in the light, they’d never see you. Both men could also have been picked off by a sniper from the peaceful little sailboat or even the two sexed-up speedboats backing us up in the shadows, but the idea here was to sneak in and out. And, unlike terrorists, we weren’t supposed to actually hurt anyone.
Video cameras covered the ramps just off the dock, but they were easy to avoid. A large discharge pipe, cooling unit, and what looked to be some sort of internal plant sewer treatment facility obscured their view both of the water directly in front of them and the northern side of dock and ramps leading to the rest of the plant. Which was where Sean, Trace, and I chose to come ashore.
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