by Wesley Cross
“Whatever you need, sir.”
“If…” Victor paused and leaned toward the hood covering the man’s head. “If, for whatever reason, Darius Price becomes the new president of the United States, I want you to make sure he is inaugurated in New York City.”
“But—” the man started, only to gurgle as Mute slapped him again.
“Let him speak.”
“Nobody’s been inaugurated outside of DC since—”
“Lyndon Johnson on Air Force One,” Victor said. “I know. And it was under some rather unusual circumstances. But it’s not important. What is important, is that if Darius Price somehow won back the votes, he takes his oath in New York City. Price is a decent man, but like any man in politics, he has a big ego. Exploit that. George Washington took his oath in New York. For any politician to be compared to Washington is great praise. I’m sure Darius is no exception. Do we have a deal, Matthew?”
“And if I cannot deliver? I will do anything in my power to make that happen, but what if I can’t?”
Victor remained silent for a few moments as the limo passed through the gate into the parking lot of the airport and came to a stop.
“That would be unfortunate,” he said. “I’ll tell you what. I’m about to get on a plane and you’re going to take a nice long ride back to New York with my friend here in the backseat. You should be there in a few hours. What I want you to spend those hours thinking about is this: those who fail me end up in a dark place, where very skilled people slowly remove their skin over the course of a few days. Sometimes it takes weeks. Maybe, if I’m particularly unhappy, I’ll have your family keep you company there as well. Are we clear, Matthew?”
“Yes, sir,” the man said, hanging his head. A few quiet sobs escaped through the hood. “I will make sure it happens.”
“Cheer up, Matthew,” Victor said, opening the door and stepping out of the car. The sun was climbing higher, and the wind felt pleasantly warm on his face. “If everything works out well, we might not even need your services. Then you’ll go on with your life and forget about this trip as if it was nothing but a bad dream.”
21
Schlager took an exit off the highway and in a few minutes, the black minivan pulled into a parking lot of the warehouse. The long L-shaped building was in the past painted in white paint. But there was no evidence it happened any time recently, and the walls had a patchy, grime-covered appearance. A dark outline of a sign that read Westore could be seen above a single window.
“You’ve been here before?” Chen asked, getting out of the van and looking across the parking lot.
“Yeah.” Schlager produced a chain with a key. “I know the way.”
“Do we need to sign in or anything?”
“Nope,” he said as they walked to the building. “It’s one of those don’t ask, don’t tell kind of places. People store all kinds of stuff in here. As long as you pay the rent and don’t bother anybody, nobody’s asking questions.”
The man sitting behind the desk glanced at them for only long enough to assess if they were going to be trouble. Satisfied with his observation, he went back to the game on a handheld computer.
“This way.” Schlager pointed, as he led Chen down a long hallway with identical vertical gates on both sides. Faded four-digit numbers were painted at the bottom of each door. “Here it is.”
The gate of the storage unit clanged as it rolled up, and Schlager glanced up and down the hallway to make sure nobody could see them. He ducked under the metal edge and waved Helen to follow him. Then he flipped the light switch and rolled the gate back down.
“Hello, beauties,” he said, looking at the two five-foot-tall cubes covered by tarps, sitting on wood pallets in the center of the storage unit. He walked to one of them and pulled the tarp off, revealing neat rows of one-hundred-dollar bills wrapped in plastic. He ran his hand over the bundles, feeling the bumps where the bills’ ends met. “This doesn’t get old. Like a scene from a movie, isn’t it?”
“Hopefully not the scene where the feds bust in and put us in handcuffs,” Chen offered. She walked closer and tapped her finger on the plastic covering the banknotes. “Unreal. I’ve never seen this much cash in my life.”
“It doesn’t get any less spectacular, no matter how many times I see this. The first time Mike brought me here, I had a hard time keeping my jaw off the floor. You know what else I saw in the movies featuring so much cash?” Schlager jumped up and sat on top of the cube, opening his hands wide.
“Dream on,” Chen said. “And you can wipe that smirk off your face. I’m not having sex with you on top of this.”
“Oh well.” Schlager hopped off the cube and shrugged. “It was worth a shot.”
“Although,” Chen said slowly and then burst out laughing, looking at Schlager’s face. “Nope, still not doing it. You should’ve seen your face.”
“That’s not nice,” he said, joining her. “Way to go, crushing a man’s dreams. Anyway, do you have any ideas?”
“How to launder all this? No clue. You?”
“Well,” he walked around the cube, tracing his fingers on top of the bills, “the hardest part is going to be depositing all this cash. Once it’s in the system, we can shuffle it to a million places to create a plausible provenance of the money.”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” Chen said. “The question is—how do we deposit it into the banking system in the first place?”
“Fair enough. Maybe we shouldn’t re-invent the wheel. Take a page out of the drug cartels’ book. Buy high-value items—say, diamonds or precious metals—with cash. Then move them across the border and sell them there.”
“We’d need a team.”
“Yeah.” He looked at the stacks of money. “We’d have to do it in multiple cities simultaneously. This is too much cash to spend in one place. Even in New York. At least we don’t have to fly it commercial. I can put Kowalsky on it. But it’s going to be hard even with a team if we want to keep it under the radar with relatively small amounts. Ideally under ten grand.”
“We are talking about thousands of transactions. Tens of thousands, actually. That’s going to take months. We should have done this a long time ago.”
“We didn’t need it a long time ago.”
A phone vibrated in Schlager’s pocket. He fished it out and, seeing the caller ID, put it on a speaker.
“Max?” Jason Hunt’s voice echoed through the small space.
“Hey. I’m at the storage place here with Helen,” he said, laying the phone down on top of the money pile. “Strategizing. Are you in a car? You sound like you’re driving.”
“We are. Let me give you a nice incentive,” Hunt said. He paused as a sound of an angry blaring horn filled the room for a moment. “All our DOD contracts have been pulled. You were right, Helen. Engel is doing exactly what you said he would.”
“Shit,” Schlager said. “He’s not even in the White House yet. How the hell is he doing this? Like, all contracts?”
“Yes. Effective immediately. No explanation, nothing. Until further review, the letter said. We’ll sue, but it will not matter. Our accounts will run dry in three months and he’ll be in the Oval Office by then. We won’t get them back. Mike is taking me back to the tower now. I need to figure out what exactly we are working with.”
“I don’t want to sound pessimistic, but we won’t be able to do this in three months,” Chen said. “Or six. I just don’t see how.”
“I might be able to help,” Connelly’s voice said. “Though it might cost us a nice chunk.”
“Go on.”
“Awhile back, when I still worked undercover for Engel, I flew down to Bolivia. Engel was trying to strike a partnership with Diego Flores, the self-proclaimed Prince of Cocaine. At the time, Engel’s drug side business was already in full swing but he was too dependent on the triads. He sent me down there with one of the corporate heads to get Flores as a new supplier for Guardian.”
“How did that go?�
�� Schlager said.
“Not very well. The problem was Flores wanted to become the sole supplier, and that was precisely what Guardian was trying to get away from. But to make matters worse, the guy I was with was an ass who had no idea how to negotiate and told Flores he was not interested in whatever the man was proposing.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. They put us in the rooms and before long, two ladies showed up pretending to be part of the hospitality package, only to try to kill us both.”
“I take it they weren’t successful.” They heard Hunt chuckle.
“Not with me,” Connelly said. “But the other guy wasn’t so lucky. I barely made it out of there and while doing this, totaled Flores’s favorite Bentley. Let’s just say the guy probably doesn’t have a lot of fond memories.”
“What would you suggest?”
“I can fly down there and try to convince him to clean our pile for us.”
“That is a bad idea,” Schlager said. “He’ll kill you at first sight.”
“Maybe,” Connelly said. “But maybe not. He wasn’t happy about his beloved Bentley, I’m sure. But he hates Engel’s guts. He might take this as an opportunity to stick it to him. And he’s a businessman first; I’m sure he’ll see this as a big opportunity and try to charge us an arm and a leg.”
“It’s your arms and legs I’m concerned with,” Hunt said.
“Wait,” Schlager said and laughed. “Did you say you wrecked a Bentley?”
“Yeah.”
“I remembered something,” he said, laughing harder and doing his best to ignore Helen’s quizzical look. “Didn’t Engel buy a rare Bentley few years back? I don’t remember the name. It was Blue Train or something. They made only a handful, and he got one?”
“Now you’re speaking my language, Max,” Connelly said.
“I like it,” Chen said. “We steal Engel’s car and give it to Flores to stick it to Engel. This is poetic.”
“Christ,” Hunt said. “I guess we’re stealing Engel’s car.”
22
“Are you sure about this?” The helicopter pilot craned his neck to look at her. “It’s dark as hell and if your helmet malfunctions, you’ll be flying blind.”
The bird’s blades were cutting cold air at five thousand feet above the island. Jill Cooper looked over the edge—the pilot was being dramatic, but not by much. Thick clouds were covering most of Manhattan in uneven patches, with lights shining in between the gaps. Farther north, the large rectangle of Central Park loomed as dark as an ancient forest.
Getting a 3D image of Engel’s eye turned out to be easier than she had thought. There were a few places throughout Guardian regularly visited by Engel that had a retina scan. Soon she found the weakest spot—a private elevator in the Sherry-Netherland hotel that would carry Engel to his penthouse. After that, it was just a matter of being patient. At the first opportunity, she clipped a skimmer—a thin, transparent rectangle—to the retina scanner and then, a week later, retrieved it filled to the brim with multiple scans of her target.
What turned out to be an unexpectedly difficult part of her plan was finding anyone willing to fly a helicopter. Doing it at night for a sole passenger with a wing suit and an apparent death wish seemed to be not high on the to-do list for most people with access to aircraft. It was even harder to convince the pilot to keep the flight off the official record. It wasn’t clear if it was a brown paper bag with a few stacks of hundred dollar bills or the visible pistol tucked in her side holster that did the trick, but it didn’t matter. She was here now.
“I’ll be fine.” She pushed a button on the palm of her glove a few times, switching between different screen modes projected on the inside of her slick black helmet. A bright path seemingly hovering in the air stretched between the helicopter and the building at the southeast corner of Central Park—her final destination. “Thanks for the ride.”
She grabbed the side of the door and pushed herself off into the black void. The drop was immediate and terrifying. Cooper spread her arms and legs out, stretching the ripstop nylon surface of the suit, but it was a few seconds before she was traveling fast enough for the suit to generate lift. She was gliding now, but as she risked a quick glance up, the shining dotted line showing her optimal path to the building was hovering high above her actual path. She clicked through the view images on her screen—the wind was working in her favor, but it wasn’t strong enough to carry her to where she needed to be. At this rate, she was going to smash into the side of the building. Cooper had a decision to make.
Unlike most wingsuit jumpers, she wasn’t carrying a parachute on her back for the last stage of the flight. Nestled between her shoulder blades sat two slim, matte-black cylinders that contained hydrogen peroxide and pressurized nitrogen. When activated, the jetpack would generate a thousand-horsepower grunt that would balance her on the tip of a stream eight-hundred degree centigrade hot. The problem was, to keep it light, there was only enough fuel for sixty seconds of continuous flight, just long enough to slow her down first for the descend on top of the building, and then for the shorter flight to Central Park when her mission was done. But the current trajectory shown in bright-red dots terminated at the forty-something floor of the fifty-story building, which didn’t leave her with a lot of options.
Cooper moved her limbs to flare the suit and slow down her descent, and pushed the button, firing up the thrusters. The roar of the jet engines drowned out the rush of the wind for a few moments and the arc of her fall flattened and then went up, overshooting the optimal path to the landing spot. She hit the button again, turning off the engines.
Now Cooper could see the gray rectangle of the roof with no enhancements. She swerved, trying to align herself along the longer side of the building. The middle of the roof was a jumbled mess of air vents, water tanks, and a sprawling web of pipes. But on either long edge, there was a smooth surface of polished concrete about thirty feet wide. It was going to have to be her runway.
She flipped in the air, flaring the suit as much as she could to slow down, and powered the thrusters again. The gray mass of the building rushed toward her, and then she was tumbling down the hard surface. Cooper flipped again and ungracefully skidded the last few yards on her buttocks, coming to a stop just a few feet away from the western edge of the roof.
“This could’ve been worse,” Cooper groaned as she got up and walked a few steps to look over the edge. The street below, separated by the black void of the night, seemed impossibly far. She looked at the fuel indicator in the lower left corner of her visor. Thirty-two percent. “Crap. It’ll have to do.”
She took off her gear and sprinted toward the ventilator shaft. A hand-sized crawler droid went in first, attaching itself to the security system cables and splicing surveillance of the office into an endless loop. Cooper’s lips curled into a smirk—the droid was Guardian’s tech she had used many times against their competitors.
A minute later, she was dangling on the cable under the ceiling of Engel’s main office, ready to flee at the first sign of trouble. The office stayed quiet.
Cooper disengaged the carabiner and dropped to the floor. Then she slid behind the massive mahogany desk and pulled out two thumb-sized optical slides: one containing Engel’s fingerprint and the other the man’s retina scan. She held her breath as the computer processed the images. After what seemed like an eternity, the machine beeped and powered up with a soft whoosh, and Cooper plugged in the external hard drive.
There was no time to browse Engel’s documents here. She’d have to figure it out once she was in a safe location. As the progress bar ran across the small pop-up window on the screen, Cooper kept glancing at the strip of light under the massive door. At last, the screen blinked, and the window disappeared.
She powered down the computer and climbed back out through the ventilation shaft, replacing the gate back to its place and retracing her steps back to the roof. Then, she recalled the crawler, and strapped back into the jetpa
ck. Her next destination was Sheep Meadow, a fifteen-acre sprawling meadow between West Sixty-Sixth and Sixty-Ninth Street.
Her flight computer estimated a twenty-four hundred feet distance.
She sighed. There was no way to make that flight without propulsion. Cooper’s suit gave a four-to-one glide ratio, meaning that for each foot dropped, she would gain four feet. But that ratio would only work when she was getting a full lift from the suit. Starting at the height of seven hundred feet, that didn’t leave a lot of room.
Cooper walked around the building’s perimeter to get to the northern side and walked back, giving herself a small path. It was going to be close.
“Here goes nothing,” she said, and broke into a hard run. She leaped off the side of the building, activating the engine at the same time. It roared, giving her a hard push as she streaked across Grand Army Plaza and then over the black surface of the Pond. The path in her visor pulsated amber—she was losing altitude too fast. She swerved, doing her best to ride the light breeze. Another red alert popped on the inside of her helmet. Fuel at ten percent.
Cooper shut off the engine as she zoomed over Center Drive and shot across the trees separating her from the relative safety of Sheep Meadow.
“Ah shit.” She flipped feet-first and put the thrusters into overdrive as she crashed through the top of the trees, barely missed the fence separating the baseball diamond from the sidewalk, and crash-landed into the wet sand. Cooper rolled a few times before coming to a full stop and then stayed on the ground, motionless, assessing damage.
“I’m getting too old for this shit,” she said, looking up into the dark sky.
Nothing seemed to have been broken, and she gingerly picked herself up, wincing from the pain in her back, unzipped the wingsuit, and removed her jetpack.
She looked around. The park was quiet. If anyone had witnessed her dramatic landing, they were not eager to investigate. It suited her fine. Cooper folded her suit and jetpack into what reasonably resembled a medium-sized suitcase and headed toward the road. She was itching to see the contents of Engel’s hard drive.