Cox readily agreed to let me run the mission anyway I saw fit. He even said something along the lines of “Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work?” and wasn’t just trying to jerk me off. He also agreed to cut me in directly on any intelligence he received. I got the impression that the NSA was using him. Boreland or someone else there had probably hoped to run this gig for some time, and they saw Cox—and by extension, me—as a ripe mark, easy to use.
That wasn’t an argument not to do it, assuming it could be done easily.
“Where is it?” I asked him finally, after we’d more or less sketched out an agreement.
“Very convenient for you in New York,” he told me. “It’s right in the city. Queens.”
In a bank. Across from a police station.
A real snap.
Chapter
10
Dan Capel’s New York City office had been designed by a world-class architect and design team with one goal in mind: to impress the piss out of corporate clients. It must work, because if it didn’t, he would never be able to pay the mortgage.
I stepped off the elevator onto a marble floor. A receptionist sat behind a teak throne far enough across the area that I would have needed binoculars to read her facial expressions. As I walked toward her, my progress was recorded by two different optical cameras and a video system. A biometric laser system took my measurements carefully enough to prepare a suit that would have required no alterations, not even in the notoriously difficult to master crotch. Panels below the marble recorded my weight. They weren’t contemplating my coffin. All of this information was compared to the data that had already been collected downstairs to make sure I hadn’t somehow outfoxed the preliminary security system as well as the two guards who screened anyone using the private elevator. (There were also security people in the main lobby, employed by the landlord, but they were about on par with most security people in building lobbies, even New York’s. It might have taken twenty seconds’ worth of thought and effort to get past them, assuming they were in suspicious moods. The bank off the lobby had a rent-a-cop as well, though he looked to be about seventy.)
The secretary at the desk had black belts in karate and Krav Maga, an Israeli self-defense method that teaches practitioners to kill without using weapons other than their hands. It’s doubtful she would have had a chance to use either art if attacked, however. The metal strips that line the walls, floors, and ceilings aren’t meant to be decorative, though they do give the place a high-tech flash. They’re arranged to send enough current flying across the room to stop a bull at the push of a button. Anyone who flirts with the secretary risks setting off the system, because, in addition to the hot button on her desk and the two hidden nearby, the system is tied to a computer that constantly monitors her vital signs; shoot her or even get her to breathe hard and it goes off.
And that’s just in the front room.
Capel was waiting for me in his office down the hall, a nice fresh pot of coffee and a tray of fruit on his desk. Rubbing shoulders with the corporate elite hasn’t changed him personally, but it sure has taught him how to treat guests. He put his hand to the mouthpiece of his phone as I came in, giving me a “Hey, Skip, how’s it hangin’?” smile.
“Have to make a few phone calls to do a little hand-holding, Dick,” he explained a few minutes later. “Then we’ll hit the road. No more than ten more minutes, if that. Amuse yourself.”
A dangerous invitation, surely, but rather than playing with some of Capel’s high-tech toys or the weight bench in the corner, I went over to the glass and admired New York City. Capel had the good taste to locate his office near midtown, and on a nice sunny spring morning, the view was fantastic. I’m not talking of the skyline or the river, which you could see if you used the telescope he had set up near the corner. Much better was the view of the young ladies walking to work, and no telescope was necessary. New York has some of the greatest museums in the world, but the best art is free on the streets.
We did the meet-and-greet thing for a few hours. I enjoy it, though being in a sea of suits can be a little disorienting. Capel moved so smoothly among them I swear someday he’s going to run for office as mayor or President—nothing in between.
The Queens Savings Association is a small savings bank where you can get a holiday club account and maybe a mortgage. They give Tootsie Roll Pops out to kids, and there’s at least a fifty-fifty chance the bank clerks will say hello cheerfully when you come in. If you’ve had an account for any length of time, the bank manager will probably know your name.
Yup. Prime takeover target for a heartless conglomerate. Don’t know how they missed it for this long.
The interior was protected by infrared and motion detectors; the doors and windows were wired as well. The windows on the second floor were grated, but the ones on the three stories above that weren’t. It would be rather risky to climb in that way, however; the bank sat across from a police station.
Capel posed as a small businessman interested in finding out what kind of services the bank offered. The information he wanted took all of five minutes to obtain, but the bank was sparsely staffed, which meant Capel had to wait for the manager for nearly a half hour before he got a chance to ask his questions. This was just fine with him; it not only gave him a chance to observe the routine but also gave him an easy excuse to inquire about the restroom, which turned out to be on the second floor.
Capel wandered up there and quickly discovered the computer area, which sat directly off the hall. He went through the open door, ostensibly to ask which way it was to the restroom, but of course getting a feel for the layout. A bored looking techie sat in the corner, playing the latest version of interactive Doom on a PC connected to the Internet via a T1 line. The geek seemed somewhat annoyed to have to look up from his game, and Capel had an easy time snapping pictures of the room with his digital camera. He noted that, like the downstairs area, it was protected by motion detectors, but otherwise it was not under surveillance. The bank had only the first and second floors of the building. There was no direct access to the upper offices, which had belonged to a clothing manufacturer that had sent its subsistence-level wages overseas a decade before.
I looked things over outside. Unlike many buildings in the area, the bank and the others nearby didn’t have backyards. A narrow alley ran behind them, just wide enough for a car to get through. The alley ran from the street to the back of an apartment complex. Past a certain point, a vehicle would get snagged against a cement sidewalk that jutted out on the left. Someone on foot, however, could get inside the apartment through one of the open passages, run through the basement area, and then out onto the main street or one of two other side streets, since the building spanned an entire block and the basement doors were not locked.
Another alley, this one wide enough to be a street, flanked the north side of the bank. A three-bay garage that must have dated from the Thirties sat on the far side. A spotless BMW M5 was parked in one of the bays. A telephone pole sat at the head of the alley; there was a transformer on it.
The sweatshop had once had a fire escape but now only the rust spots remained. From the outside, it looked deserted, and the separate entrance at the side of the bank storefront was locked shut. It looked possible to get in by getting onto the roof of the building next door and simply going through one of the upper windows; I decided to find out.
I got into the building with no problem, but the layout of the apartments prevented easy access to the roof or the building next door. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. The building next to the one with the hardware store was also three stories, and this one had a fire escape on the backside that connected to the roof. I pulled myself up and was just starting to climb when I heard a voice below.
“Hey, mister, what are you doing?”
A six- or seven-year-old squirt squinted up at me from the ground.
“Lost my baseball on the roof over there,” I said, trying to come up wit
h a story that would seem plausible to a kid. “I’m going to get it.”
“Want some help?”
In fifteen years or so, sure. I told him he could look around in the yard and let me know if he found anything. Then I scampered up and made my way across to the sweatshop. I didn’t have to break the windows; someone had done that long ago.
More pigeon shit than you can imagine. Otherwise, bare floors and a lot of dust.
The sweatshop hadn’t left one thread of material behind. There was a large service elevator on the top floor, which stopped on the other floors and went directly to the bottom landing, next to the stairs. I walked down the stairs. There was no way into the bank from the shuttered area. I went back the way I came. The kid must have been called in to do his homework or something, because he was gone when I jumped from the ladder.
I went back around the alley, went through the apartment building out onto the main drag, then walked down the block to the local deli and bought myself a water—two and a half bucks for a glass of something that used to be free. Sipping slowly—every mouthful was worth about fifteen cents, by my reckoning—I sauntered back down the street, watching the comings and goings of the block. It was a little past four; the police station was quieter than the bank.
Capel emerged from the building with an armful of brochures. “If their security were any good, I think I’d open an account,” he told me. “Not only are the interest rates good, but some of the tellers are real lookers. And they’re open five, six days a week.”
“So maybe you should open an account. Say Wednesday around noon.”
“I think one o’clock will be better, maybe a little later,” he said. “New York banks do a lot of business around lunchtime, and the ones that actually care about customers delay their employees’ lunch hour until the rush slacks off.”
Banks that care about customers—you can find anything in New York.
Capel explained the layout and personnel setup. The upstairs geek was the only difficulty, and there were several ways of dealing with him once we were inside. We discussed the possibilities of how the bank’s computer system had come to be used by scumbags. It doesn’t take much to surreptitiously get something onto a computer hooked into the Internet—run Spybot some time on your home machine and you’ll see. Capel thought the fact that the geek was playing a networked computer game meant he didn’t bother spending all that much time on security, though I didn’t jump to that conclusion myself.
“You have an idea for getting in?” Capel asked as we walked toward his car.
I turned and pointed toward the telephone.
“Ah yes, Con Ed. Always a handy villain,” he said. “You’re picking on power companies a hell of a lot lately.”
“It’s the least I can do. They upped my rates last fall.”
Since finding the rifle and the van we’d continued to shuffle our lodging arrangements, keeping things fluid. We also adjusted the trail system. Shadow was eventually going to make another mistake; in the meantime my best strategy was to make things hard for him.
I decided I could use a “clean” operative in the bank, someone to play customer and keep the manager occupied besides Capel. Since we were in New York, Brandy Alexander sprang to mind.
There’s no way I can describe Brandy with words. Anything I say will sound clichéd and overwrought, and still it’ll fail by a mile to capture how beautiful she is. You may have seen her on a few commercials by now; a print ad in some of the big mags featured her hawking Chivas Regal. Dark, raven hair, five-eight, penetrating eyes, and a presence—she just walks in a way that dominates a room. The air around her begins to catch fire, and you find yourself staring even if you didn’t intend to.
It even happens to me. I met her in a small Greenwich Village restaurant Monday night, and when she walked into the place every eye in the room glued itself on her, mine included. I rose up gallantly. I may be a rogue, but I can muster a bit of Polish polish when necessary, especially in the presence of a BYT, aka “Beautiful Young Thing.”
Brandy had spent the afternoon at a theater tryout, vying for a part in an off-off-off-Broadway play. I’ve forgotten what the name of the show was, but I remember the part she wanted: a Catholic nun. I knew when she mentioned it there was no way Brandy would get the part; she might be able to act it, but I doubt she would look chaste and repressed in sackcloth. Even if she would have, it would have taken more imagination than any human being could possess to translate her image into that of a nun.
She ordered a chardonnay and took sips a bird would have thought scant. She told me about the audition and then we talked about the city, which by then had returned to normal after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center downtown. Normal on the surface, I should say; tension lurked just below. A councilman had been shot at City Hall a few weeks earlier; the news reports had made sure to include the bulletin that it was not a terrorist attack, which Brandy said showed how jumpy everyone still was.
“It was on everyone’s mind, that it’ll happen again,” she said. She took one of her tiny sips—my own glass of Bombay was nearly drained—then put her hand on mine. “Do you think it will, Dick?”
I wanted to lie. I wanted to reassure her more than anything, take her in my arms and say everything was going to be okay. But I couldn’t. I see massive security holes everywhere I look. The nuclear power plant was just one example. More has to be done; we’re simply not serious about the threat we face, and too many of the people calling the shots are unwilling to do what it takes to get real about the world and its problems. But I’d given that lecture earlier in the day at Capel’s bash. Now I told her I hoped so and turned the conversation back to her acting, listening to some of her stories about commercials.
“Have you ever played a bank customer?” I asked finally.
“No,” she said. “Is it a speaking part or a walk-on?”
“A little of both,” I said, ordering another drink.
About midnight, there was a knock on my hotel door. I got up from the bed where I’d been watching CNN and walked over, pistol in hand.
“Yeah?” I whispered.
“It’s me, Trace. I don’t have my key.”
We all had code words to use in case we had been taken hostage, different ways of alerting someone in a situation like this that there was a person or persons with weapons behind us. Trace hadn’t used hers.
On the other hand, I knew that she hadn’t forgotten her key, since I’d made a point of reminding her about it earlier in the day. I slipped my cell phone out and dialed Rogue Manor, where I’d posted an on-duty op as a kind of safety net. Worst case, he’d hear what was going on and send the cavalry.
Or at least the guys with the body bags.
I slipped the chain away and pulled open the door, gun ready.
“You’re going to shoot us just because the champagne is the cheap Spanish stuff?” asked Trace, holding up two bottles and some glasses.
Even better, Karen stood behind her.
Karen had brought news that our status at Homeland Insecurity had been restored, but she could have told me that the universe had just been nuked and I would have been just as happy to see her. It turned out that Trace had checked in with Rogue Manor earlier and found that Karen had left a message; she had arranged to meet Karen and take her to our cell’s lair. It was a nice, sisterly gesture on Trace’s part, looking after me like that; it was also a signal that she accepted the platonic turn our relationship had taken and wanted it to continue. She stayed for a drink, then pretended she was tired and headed for a room she’d just reserved down the hall.
I’d adopt her as my daughter but she’d make me pay for her wedding someday.
The hotel room came with a double-size bathtub.
’Nuf said.
Considering we had kicked the security team’s butt all over the two-hundred-something acres at Wappino, they were pretty gracious at the debrief. Furness especially. He organized the afternoon session as a clamb
ake, trying to keep it on the free and easy side. The highlight was the race to retrieve Trace’s remote video cam, won by a slip of a kid who bolted up the tower so fast I had Trace get his name in case we ever needed someone for human monkey work. He was undoubtedly motivated by first prize—a kiss from the Apache princess herself. She put so much lip action into it I’m sure the kid had wet dreams for a month.
Did Wappino get the Cadillac security system?
I haven’t checked. They did pay our bills without a whimper, however.
Wednesday morning around eight A.M., Queens Savings experienced a minor power surge. It wasn’t anything much, just enough of a boost to register on one of the logs kept by the system administrator and annoy the manager, who was just starting the coffee machine in the back.
At ten-twenty-two, there was a similar event, strong enough to set off the audible alarms.
At twelve-thirty power went out. Con Edison, which just happened to be in the area, responded almost immediately with a truck, and power was restored in less than twenty minutes.
Fixing the problem and finding out exactly what had caused it, however, were two different things. Around one-fifteen a unit supervisor arrived on the scene, talked over the situation with the lineman, and—after considerable head-shaking—took one of his techies around the neighborhood on a power-usage survey.
What did that have to do with the blackout? And what did the survey involve?
Nothing and a whole lot of nothing respectively, but it sure opened doors. I was the supervisor, having borrowed the creds of a Con Ed worker who’d been at a local gym that morning. I also had a very official-looking hard hat and an equally impressive clipboard. I also had an ID that I flashed, thumb over the picture.
We took our time getting to the Queens Saving Association. I thought I’d have to get physical with Sean when he saw the BMW in the garage; he was still talking about it as we found the manager. I tried explaining what we were up to but the manager had little time for me; he needed, really needed, to get back to a customer who had just come in and was crossing her miniskirted legs in his glassed-in office.
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