Against the Dark

by Carolyn Crane

  Cole watched Borgola ham it up with one of his pet assassins. The men here were monsters, no question.

  He’d heard of law enforcement professionals taking psychology courses as a way of getting into the heads of criminals. It made him want to laugh. He’d gotten his psychology courses from day one, courtesy of his drug-addled parents—there was no better school in the world for reading people. In a family like his, if you couldn’t instantly read the moods and intentions of your parents and the predatory adults floating in and out of your home, you were done. He’d been at the mercy of some real perverts before he’d learned how to be invisible, and later, to fight back.

  And you couldn’t be a nerd in a dangerous neighborhood and not know how to fight. A bookish boy had to be tougher than the bullies and gangbangers because kids were constantly testing him. They saw the glasses and books and good grades as an invitation to beat him up. Cole set them straight on that.

  As he grew older, the creeps that came around to visit his parents would confide in him, and he heard every kind of story from every kind of low-life. He came to know pretty quickly what made them tick, what pissed them off, what cranked their engines.

  When Cole was 15, his folks won a settlement off a bogus lawsuit—six figures. They promised things would be different. They’d move, live the good life. Like an idiot, Cole had allowed himself to feel hopeful. But after he went to bed that night, his parents had shoved a good five figures right up their noses, or at least they tried. In the morning, when he came down ready for school, they were dead.

  He’d never forget finding them slumped on each other. The way the bottom fell right out of his heart when he touched their cold cheeks.

  Both Cole and the settlement money were taken on by distant relatives, who used most of it for home repairs and vacations and the rest to send him to St. Luke’s Military Academy, a decrepit and savage boarding school full of juvenile delinquents from across North and South America. Cole made enough of a name for himself there in terms of aptitude in math and ability to defend himself that he got the attention of Dax, the leader of the Associates.

  He’d never actually met Dax—nobody met Dax—but the man pulled him out of St. Luke’s and supplied him with accelerated training in violence and math, and then he funded Cole’s Ph.D. in logistics. After that, Cole joined the Association, Dax’s shadowy organization dedicated to fighting crime worldwide. The Association struck Cole as an island of badass misfits; each Associate had a nerdy specialty and a whole lot of demons deep inside.

  Cole felt like he was finally home.

  There were 1329 container shipping companies that might be working with Borgola, operating thousands of ships in the Pacific. With time running out, Cole needed to narrow the search for the kids the old fashioned way—by getting at Borgola’s shell corporation documents, and Cole had a good idea of where they were.

  According to rumors, Borgola had two safes. A bedroom safe for precious stones and cash, but somewhere in the mansion was a secret safe, and apparently Borgola was the only person alive who knew where it was. All the workers who’d installed it had been killed.

  Cole suspected the secret safe was in the tunnels below the mansion, and he’d been searching nightly, inch by inch, using X-Ray equipment he’d gotten from the Association. He’d been caught down there once already. He managed to hide the equipment and make up a good story, but he was surprised he’d lived the night, especially with Mapes trying make him look untrustworthy to the paranoid old man. Really, he should’ve left after that.

  A few days later, Cole noticed his room in the security wing of the mansion had been very carefully searched. He definitely should have left after that.

  But he was so close to locating the safe—like hell he’d leave and squander all the progress he’d made. His entire being buzzed with the need to see those documents, free those kids. He couldn’t stop thinking about them, stepping onto that ship so full of hope, only to find agony and darkness. It killed him to think it.

  The secret safe would be a Fenton Furst. Virtually uncrackable, so he’d been told, but he figured he’d try and blow it and get out somehow. He’d gotten out of worse.

  “Why do I have the sense things are getting a little hot there?” Dax had said when they’d spoken a week earlier.

  “I won’t run away from a little danger,” Cole said.

  “You running from danger has never been the problem, has it, Cole?” Dax was some kind of multi-billionaire, and highly intuitive—he always seemed to know everything. “Has it?”

  Cole had remained silent. It never really worked out to answer Dax’s rhetorical questions.

  “Nobody understands the logistics of criminal operations like you do,” Dax said. “But you and I both know where your real passion lies. It’s in the implosion. The end game. You think you’ll find your answers in the fire.”

  The statement had stunned him. He sometimes didn’t know what Dax was. “No,” he said. “I don’t think it.” Did he?

  “You can’t understand everything.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m trusting you to get out if it’s hot,” Dax said.

  It was hot. He should get out. But he wasn’t going to.

  He scanned around for Angel, wanting to rest his eyes on her. All he needed was to see some beauty, just for a little while.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Angel, Macy, and White Jenny headed to the trophy room, which was also the billiards and darts room. They lingered at the opening to the home theater, currently playing an X-rated flick. A whole passel of people were fucking in the seats. Loudly and groaningly.

  White Jenny caught Angel’s eye and made a confused face. Angel bit her lip to keep from laughing.

  According to White Jenny’s computer model, the door to one of three mechanical rooms was located at the back of the theater; this mechanical room provided access to the mansion’s heat, light, sound, and some of the security.

  “Ready?” Macy asked.

  Angel strolled in like she was drunk and wandered to the back and sat. When she was relatively sure nobody was paying attention, she snuck around and unlocked the door, then headed up to the front.

  That was Macy’s cue to meet her for six minutes of diversion—a drunken girl fight in front of the movie screen to cover the light and sound from White Jenny slipping into the mechanical room and using a drill to open panels. They made it look good, shoving each other and calling each other whores, among other things. Jenny would use an interrupter to bypass the alarm, reset the cameras to stop filming the areas they’d go through, and crawl into the vent system to where Jocko had stashed the packs with their equipment. She would then position herself above the second floor bathroom and wait.

  Once the six minutes were up, they left to head for the bathroom rendezvous point. Somebody was in there, so they waited their turn, then went in and locked the door. They knocked on the ceiling and White Jenny dropped down with the packs. The three of them changed into black cat suits, complete with black facemasks and boots and belts with a shit ton of hardware. White Jenny and Macy disappeared up into the vents. Angel cracked the door to see if anyone was out there. Luckily nobody was waiting. She left the door cracked, turned out the light and hoisted herself up into the vent, happy she’d kept up her gym workouts; thievery took some serious bursts of strength.

  Mansion jobs had been a specialty of theirs. Condos, too. They particularly liked vacation condos, though Angel didn’t miss the nasty spiders and snakes you ran into when you were crawling around where you shouldn’t be in destination locations.

  It was a lot of tight, dusty hell to get up to the sixth level. They dropped into a crawl space behind the master bedroom. Angel unwound her earbuds and put her attention on the wall that abutted the big man’s bedroom. It wouldn’t do to pop in if it was occupado.

  She breathed in deeply, enjoying the exhilaration of crossing forbidden lines, of seeing and hearing everything from inside the shadows, of defying dan
ger with nothing but skill and smarts. It was delicious to be back.

  Her girls watched and waited, two sets of eyes through facemask holes, as Angel twisted the tiny dial on the tool, blood racing. This device was not your grandmother’s sonar; it could sense movement as well as topography. Nobody was utterly still; your heart gave you away if nothing else.

  When she determined the bedroom stood empty she gave the thumbs up.

  They skulked in through an access panel behind the master bath. Borgola’s bedroom was decorated much like the rest of the place, all velvet and gold. “Yo, Borgola,” Angel whispered. “Luxury is so 1998.”

  White Jenny snorted.

  Macy headed toward a large oil painting, another erotic monster pin-up. The safe would be back there. Totally obvious. But merely lifting the thing off the wall could trigger the alarm. White Jenny crouched beside her and found the alarm lead. She went to work, adding a redundant long line in preparation for putting an interrupter on the original line. Angel exchanged glances with Macy, who smiled all sly and knowing there in the moonlight, like she knew Angel was enjoying herself.

  Angel tipped her head, playing it nonchalant, and gazed out the window at the ocean in the distance with its brightly spangled surface hiding deep, dark danger. Her thoughts went to the man downstairs. She could still feel him on her skin. She’d wanted so badly to plunge into him.

  “Psst.”

  Macy. They were ready for her. Angel set a chair in front of the painting. It could take ten or twenty minutes to crack a safe; it was best if her stance was natural and comfortable. Angel got up on the chair, lifted off the painting, and handed it to White Jenny. And there it was. A Fenton Furst Mini.

  Angel smiled and ran a finger over its stainless steel face. She smelled the dial. It hadn’t been lubed lately. She turned it to get a feel for the looseness. This model was small but chock-full of rabbit holes. Sonic interference. Magnets. Her old mentor, Fenton, had been one of the premier security men in the world, but he trained safecrackers on the side. Each and every one of them was bound by the promise never to crack one of his safes while he was living. This policy had done wonders for his brand—his safes were considered un-breakable, but he’d died last year. Fenton Furst safes were now fair game to the few Fenton Furst-trained crackers still alive and not in jail.

  Angel had been his only female apprentice, and a Latina at that—she and Fenton always joked he was filling two quotas for the price of one with her, but she was one of his best and he knew it.

  Angel hated the rush of pride she felt in her special talent. It was wrong—she’d left this behind! But you could love something like crazy and know it was wrong. Angel understood that better than most anyone.

  She pressed a sticker over the numbers on the dial for the tiny, ultra-precise increments she needed. White Jenny handed her the old magnetic magnifying glass, which stuck onto the safe. Then she pressed the metal body of the tool to the safe and it stuck on. She performed a sonic sweep to help her construct a mental map of the fence depth, wheels, and contact points of the mechanism. Every Fenton Furst safe was different. She listened to the pings, absorbing low points and high points, identifying false gates and electronic interference. She closed her eyes, sinking into it, blending mechanics and intuition.

  And she lost herself.

  As the minutes ticked by, the inner workings began to take shape in her mind.

  A tap on her thigh. Macy heard somebody coming—Angel knew it by the way Macy’s eyes moved behind her dusty mask, a flick to the side, then to her. Do it now or we ditch it, that’s what Macy was saying. They didn’t need words to communicate that.

  Angel delved deeper, letting the oblivion of the job take her, turning the spindle to the right, slow and steady, all the way around to the click.

  Angel held up a finger. “Sieben,” she whispered in the dark. English was her first language, but she spoke somewhat fluent Spanish, and she cracked in bad German, the language of Fenton Furst.

  Macy pulled a gun from her utility belt.

  Angel turned the spindle again, slow and steady. You didn’t rush a safecrack. She breathed herself into the safe, as Fenton Furst had taught. Another drop. Viersehn.

  Macy locked the bedroom door and shoved a chair up against it, then eased open the window.

  Setting up the Plan B escape.

  Angel lined up the gates inside the lock, slow and steady. A few minutes later, the safe swung open.

  And the alarm blared.

  “Fuck me!” Angel grabbed five velvet bags and stuffed them in her fanny pack.

  White Jenny pulled a hammer from her holster and rushed to the window to pound in the anchor for the line they’d use to escape.

  Angel pulled on her repelling gloves and followed White Jenny and Macy out the window, wishing they’d worn vests. Borgola’s men would shoot without a second thought, but not to kill. They’d shoot to wound, so they could fuck you while you died—White Jenny had heard that from a good source. Angel thought of the guard at the party. He hadn’t seemed the type to have cruelty in him, but guys came by cruelty in a lot of different ways.

  They repelled down the three stories to the lower roof of Borgola’s mansion.

  Macy led them scrambling across the tiles of the lower roof. She’d developed all three routes. Macy was strategy, the big picture-thinking general.

  Shouts below.

  The three of them crouched in a roof nook.

  “What now?” White Jenny asked.

  “Borgola rigs the safe. Unbelievable,” Angel grumbled. “To mess with a Fenton Furst.”

  Macy pulled out a cellphone and punched in a code. “Paranoid motherfucker. Don’t worry.” She pointed the phone out at the dark lawn, at a gazebo, which promptly exploded, lighting the night.

  “Jihole!” Angel whispered.

  White Jenny snickered. “Rhonda came up with that. She’d heavy into fireworks.”

  Her gang really had moved on. They each had a grenade on their utility belt—that was new, too. Another idea courtesy of Rhonda, her replacement, she guessed. Angel didn’t know how to feel about Rhonda putting her stamp on the group.

  Macy dialed in another code, activating flashing lights and a siren out in the sea of parked cars.

  “Rhonda?” Angel said.

  “Switching up the m.o., dontchaknow,” Macy said. “It’s a diversion for this.” She tossed something over the side of the roof. A pop. Smoke bomb. “Plan C.”

  Angel nodded. They were going back up.

  White Jenny lassoed a rope over one of the chimneys. The smoke from the smoke bomb would cover their ascent from eyes on the ground.

  Macy shimmied up into white haze. Angel heard a smash over the din of sirens—that would be Macy’s boot on the fourth floor window. White Jenny went next. Angel followed her up to the third floor, but White Jenny had trouble with the last few feet up to the fourth floor window.

  “I’m sorry,” she huffed as Angel pushed on her ass to get her up there.

  “Go, go, go.” The smoke was clearing. The men out there would see them.

  Finally White Jenny heaved herself in.

  Angel shimmied up, legs and arms pumping. She felt a sharp scrape as she hauled over the window. Macy was already in the elevator messing with the wires she’d yanked out of the panel.

  White Jenny pulled an expensive vase off its pedestal next to the elevator and hurled it against the wall where it broke into pieces. “That’s for ebony morsel and chiquita taco, motherfucker,” she said.

  “Jenny, I’m cut,” Angel said. A rip in the sleeve of her cat suit exposed a long gash. Dots of blood shone like jewels against her skin.

  White Jenny was there with a safety pin. She pulled Angel’s sleeve closed tight and pinned it.

  Angel turned on her phone light and scanned the carpet for blood drips among the broken glass. Much to her horror, she found one. “Crap!” Angel pulled a knife out of her boot and cut out a circle of carpet.

  The eleva
tor car jerked up a few feet and jammed. Macy jumped down. “Jenny. Go.”

  “DNA,” Angel said to Macy. “Help me look for more.”

  “Damn.” Macy got on her hands and knees and helped Angel look.

  White Jenny got onto her back and slid into the space underneath the elevator car with a rope. She was to tie it to the underside; they planned to disappear down the shaft, one of the only ways to access the basement.

  White Jenny disappeared into the space below the elevator car.

  “I think you got it all,” Macy said. “And we have to go.” She crawled through the gap after White Jenny. “Come on!” She grabbed the rope and disappeared.

  Frantically, Angel scanned for more blood. Nothing. She knew there could be a tiny spatter. But then, even if Borgola could find it, he’d have to crack her juvenile records to match her DNA.

  It wasn’t ideal, but time was up. It would have to do.

  She stuffed the cut carpet pieces into her fanny pack, put her gloves back on, and shimmied through the space under the elevator car. She gripped the rope with her hands and legs and slid into the belly of the elevator shaft. Macy stood at the very bottom, partly illuminated by her cellphone light. She waited, holding the door open. “After you, chiquita taco.”

  Angel popped through. White Jenny followed.

  “Did you get all the blood?” White Jenny asked.

  “Pretty sure,” Angel said.

  “Who cares. They can’t tell dick from your blood,” Macy said. She flicked on a flashlight. “Damn.” They stood in an intersection of four tunnels.

  It was nothing like the model.

  “Jocko dies,” White Jenny said. “He made up this part of his map. Didn’t think we’d find out.”

  “These could all be dead ends for all we know,” Macy said.