The Tomorrow Heist

by Jack Soren

  “We’ve prepared some quick notes for you, both on Hudson and gerontology. Ryan, our tech, will be coming around with some equipment for you, one of which is a smart phone. It’ll have everything you need on it.”

  “Gotcha,” Jonathan said, looking through his credentials.

  “Um, ex-­fucking-­scuse me. How exactly am I getting on board?” Lew said, feeling like a stepchild. But there was no way he was letting Jonathan go in alone.

  “You’ll be going in through the moon pool, Lew,” Fahd said. “Once on board, you’ll mix with the support staff.” Fahd handed Lew his credentials.

  “I’ll be going where-­what? Uh, where exactly is this floating fortress docked?”

  “It’s . . . not exactly docked. It’s located off Iwo Jima.”

  “How far off?” Lew asked.

  “About eight hundred miles east of Okinawa.”

  “So, the middle of the ocean. What the hell is it doing way out there?”

  “We’re not really sure. It’s probably for security. Aside from scientists and researchers, the conference is also hosting some of the most prominent philanthropists funding longevity research today. Even some government officials. We figure that’s the reason for all the extra guards. Without them, half of the ­people on the guest list wouldn’t be going.

  “But that will work in our favor. While everyone’s security staff is bumping into each other, you can locate the painting and figure out the best way to get it.”

  “You don’t know where it is?” Lew said. He was hating this plan more and more.

  “Well, we’ve got some probable locations for you, but as to an exact, pinpoint location—­”

  “So, no.”

  “Uh, no. Not exactly.”

  “Perfect.”

  “AH, HERE HE is,” Fahd said a few minutes later. Jonathan looked up and saw a heavyset, bearded man approaching. He was the youngest member of The Custodians Jonathan had seen yet and he was carrying a metal briefcase.

  “Is now a good time?” the man asked.

  “As good as any,” Fahd said, getting up. “Jonathan, Lew, this is Ryan, our tech. I’ll leave you guys to it. When you’re done with Ryan, try to get some shut-­eye.” Fahd left, and Ryan sat down, putting the metal briefcase on his lap. He smiled sheepishly and opened the case.

  “Okay, first things first, I’ll need your personal phones and any weapons you have on you,” Ryan said. Jonathan and Lew looked at each other, then back at Ryan, making no movement to comply. “You’ll get them back when the mission is complete. Don’t worry about that.”

  They continued to stare at Ryan. Jonathan could remember this routine from back in the day when he was prepping for missions, but that was then.

  “It’s standard operating procedure, guys,” Ryan said. “Really, it’s no big—­”

  “Look, kid,” Lew said leaning forward. “It ain’t gonna happen.”

  “What’s the problem?” Fahd said when Ryan waved him back over. Ryan explained. The men looked at each other for a moment, then Fahd nodded toward the front of the plane. “Can I talk to you for a second, Jonathan?”

  He was going to refuse, but Jonathan could feel things heating up, so he got up and went a few rows away with Fahd.

  “You have to understand—­” Jonathan started.

  “Oh, I understand,” Fahd said, sounding almost angry. “You’ll take our protection, our intel for jobs and, ultimately, our money, but you don’t want to play by our rules. I think I understand completely.”

  “It’s not like that,” Jonathan said. Or was it? Fahd had kind of hit the nail right on the head. Jonathan knew when they had agreed to become The Monarch again for The Custodians that there would be some concessions. But at the first one, he’d flat-­out refused to play along. Maybe he wasn’t as ready for this as he thought.

  “Look, we’ll be outfitting you for the mission with everything we’ve deemed necessary. And trust me, whatever you guys have on you won’t even hold a candle to what we’ll provide. But if you’re thinking it’s all some ploy to get you unarmed, look around you.”

  Jonathan saw what Fahd was talking about. All of the guards—­who outnumbered him and Lew by threefold—­were still carrying machine guns over their shoulders.

  “If all I wanted to do was disarm you, you would be disarmed. Besides, I disarmed you both once already back in the Complex. Use your head.”

  “You’re right, you’re right,” Jonathan said, shaking his head.

  “Good,” Fahd said. “Can you get Lew to play along?”

  “Yes,” Jonathan said. It was interesting that Fahd had known that the way to defuse this situation was to convince him. And that it would be Jonathan’s job to convince Lew, not his. They really had done their homework.

  “Now before we have to do this all over again, there’s one more thing that you’ll need to convince Lew about,” Fahd said.

  AFTER HE RETURNED to his seat, Jonathan convinced Lew that it was okay and actually in their interest to comply. It took some doing, but this was the easy part.

  Jonathan took his ankle holster off and put it and the Walther PPK in it on top of Ryan’s metal briefcase. Then he took the folding knife out and put it beside his gun.

  “That’s me,” Jonathan said. He looked at Lew, who was reluctant, but eventually reached in his pockets.

  Ten minutes later, the case and the seat beside Ryan were filled with guns, ammo, knives, brass knuckles, a telescoping baton and two leather saps Lew had armed himself with while packing his bag.

  “How the hell do you stay upright?” Jonathan said. Lew just grinned and shrugged.

  Ryan put as much of it into the case as he could.

  “Okay, this is yours,” Ryan said, handing Jonathan a smart phone. “And this is for Lew.” He handed Lew a similar phone.

  “Do we get decoder rings too?” Lew said. Ryan looked confused.

  “Ignore him,” Jonathan said.

  “Hey, this thing is busted. No signal,” Lew said.

  “They’re not real phones. Just data devices,” Ryan said. “

  “So how do we communicate?” Lew asked.

  Here we go.

  Ryan pulled something that looked like a space-­age gun out of the briefcase. Lew recoiled.

  “What the fuck is that?” Lew said.

  “This is your locator-­slash-­comm pellet injector. A little pellet that goes in just behind your ear. You’ll be able to talk to each other and us, without anyone’s knowing. It also has GPS, so we can locate you. May I?” Ryan said, leaning toward Jonathan.

  “Sure,” Jonathan said, trying to show Lew that it was no big deal.

  This was what they had agreed to. It wouldn’t be the first time Jonathan had received an implant before a mission though those were usually RFID and under the skin on his arm, but that was a long time ago. The technology had obviously come a long way.

  “Are you nuts?” Lew said, but Jonathan could tell his own reaction was tempering Lew’s.

  “We’ve all got them,” Ryan said, turning his head and squeezing the skin behind his ear until a lump showed. “It’s kind of mandatory.”

  Jonathan shrugged and turned his head. Ryan placed the injector against his skin and pulled the trigger. It stung for a second, but then it went numb.

  “Hold this against it for a few seconds,” Ryan said, handing Jonathan some gauze. “Now you.”

  Lew hesitated, but then reluctantly leaned forward, and Ryan implanted his. When he was done, Ryan took out a laptop and opened it up.

  “Let’s see if we can find you. Uh, yep, there you are,” Ryan said, turning the screen so they could see blips on a map. “Working perfectly.”

  “And these things work anywhere? Any distance?” Jonathan asked.

  “Pretty much, except the signal attenuates under just
a foot or two of water. We’ll lose you, so just try to stay out of it.”

  “Of course,” Lew said. “Are these things always on?”

  “The tracking part is, but the audio is controlled by software. Kind of like a bluetooth device. For instance, for you two to communicate, someone has to use the software to connect or pair your devices. Otherwise, you don’t hear anything,” Ryan said.

  “But you guys can still hear us whenever you want?” Jonathan asked.

  “Not on this mission. The ship has a jamming perimeter. Radios still work on the ship, but no signals in or out.”

  After Ryan left, they reclined their seats and shut off the overhead lights. When Jonathan couldn’t sleep, he turned on his data device and started reading through his cover and the tech primer on gerontology. There was a lot to memorize, but he didn’t think it would be a problem. It was all superficial information, though. If he got cornered into a real scientific conversation by a ­couple of actual scientists, he was going to be in trouble.

  Jonathan was still fretting about that an hour later when Lew’s snoring stopped. He coughed, then looked at Jonathan in the dark.

  “Can’t sleep?” Lew said quietly.

  “It’s all a little much and a little fast.”

  “You don’t think they’re on the level?” Lew said. Jonathan looked at the guards, who were mostly sleeping, and Fahd, who was talking quietly with Ryan as they looked at a computer screen.

  “Nothing to say they aren’t.”

  “Yet,” Lew said. He turned over, using his duster as a blanket. “Relax, you get to be a spy again. You’re good at it.”

  Sometimes Lew’s insight and awareness took Jonathan by surprise, even after all these years. And he knew that if Lew hadn’t been going along to watch his back, he probably wouldn’t have been doing this.

  “You realize they haven’t told us what our cut will be if their intel is wrong and there’s no painting on board,” Lew said. He reached up and tapped behind his ear where the implant was. “You hear that, Fahd? Lew’s gots ta be paid.” He chuckled to himself, then was snoring again in no time.

  Jonathan smiled and shook his head. He wasn’t sure what was ahead of them, but he knew they’d face it together. He put the data device away and rolled over to get some sleep himself. They had a long day ahead of them.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jurojin Maru

  Saturday

  3:00 A.M. Local Time

  MAGGIE REYNOLDS WAS pulling her sneakers on in her stateroom when Alex turned on the light and sat up in the makeshift bed she’d set up on her couch for him. It wasn’t lost on her that except for a thin sheet, the lothario was naked.

  “I’m pretty sure morning needs more light than this, darling,” Alex said. “Where are you off to?”

  “I’m just going for a run. I’m too wired. Just need to burn off some of this nervous energy. I’ll be back in about an hour,” she said.

  “Want some company?” he asked, starting to pull his sheet off.

  “No! I mean, no, no, that’s all right. You—­you just stay there,” she said, pulling his sheet back up over him. “The majority of the guests are going to start arriving tomorrow, and if you’re really here to help me, we can figure out a game plan when I get back.”

  “Running. Game plan. You’re exhausting, darling. And there’s so many better ways to burn off nervous energy.” He smiled as he said it, and she could tell he was taking the piss out of her. He winked at her before rolling over and shutting off the light.

  Maggie opened the door, checked to make sure he wasn’t looking, then took her gun out of the table by the door and slipped it into her shorts before she left.

  Her run couldn’t really be called a jog this time. She trotted more than anything else, trying to avoid anyone who happened to be wandering the decks even at this early hour. She didn’t want to be exhausted by the time she reached her goal, just in case. Her shorts were tight, and the gun kept trying to bobble out of her waistband, so it took her almost an hour to get down belowdecks, back to where the three men wearing those strange exo suits had been moving that mysterious—­obviously heavy—­crate.

  As she made her way, she kept thinking about the day ahead of her. It was annoying her, but shecouldn’t help it. Even if it was only a cover job, she had always been a perfectionist. And in only a few hours almost a hundred scientists, philanthropists, heads of state, and even royalty would be descending on the Jurojin Maru. Her job as Umi’s security chief was a cover, but keeping everyone safe wasn’t. And now that MI6’s albatross was sleeping on her couch, she wanted—­needed—­to be faultless.

  She eased up to the door the men had been taking the crate through and looked inside. It was a huge hold that contained not only that crate, but dozens of smaller crates stacked around the room. As she edged closer to the partially open door, she heard voices inside. They were speaking Japanese and, oddly enough, English. But voices or not, she had to get a look inside one of those crates. No one was in sight, so she eased into the room and hid between a ­couple of the crates.

  The voices seemed to be coming from the far side of the hold, but the echo of the huge metal room made it hard to be sure. Quietly, she reached up and tried to lift the lid off one of the crates, but it didn’t budge. She reasoned that it must be nailed shut but she just didn’t have enough leverage to open it reaching up from her crouch. Peeking over the lid of the crate, she could see shadows dancing on the far wall behind the forest of crate stacks, the only light in the room coming from dim emergency lighting on the walls.

  She slowly stood up. Keeping her eye on the shadows, she pulled at the lid. It held fast at first, but then started to give way when she wiggled it from side to side. It was almost open enough to allow her to look inside, when one of the nails squeaked its reluctance.

  Bollocks!

  With no time to shove the lid back down and footsteps approaching, she ducked behind the crate again and took her gun out, hoping no one would notice the askew lid. The footsteps stopped just a few feet away. Maggie peeked between two crates and saw that it wasn’t a beefy workman but one of Umi’s guards. Technically, one of Maggie’s men, but somehow she thought the point would have been lost on him if she revealed herself.

  “Clive. What is it?” Another guard called to his companion.

  “Nothing, I guess. Thought I heard something.”

  “Relax, mate. The only things down here are us and the rats.”

  “I guess you’re right,” Clive said after a long pause. Maggie was thankful for the dim lighting—­until she saw one of the rats they’d mentioned chewing on the edge of a nearby crate. She stifled her desire to jump up and empty her clip into the vermin.

  “Get back over here. The others will be returning from the lab anytime, and we’ve still got a dozen tanks to prepare.”

  “Roger,” Clive said before Maggie heard his footsteps heading away from her position.

  Lab?

  There was something bigger going on here than a simple smuggling or planned theft. Something too big for one person to handle. She’d have to come back later. With help. She eased her gun back into her waistband and slipped out the door.

  Now that she was unsure of the loyalty of most of her guards, that left only one person. She hated the idea of having to owe anyone, especially the albatross, but she didn’t have any choice. And regardless of her desires, she was pretty sure she knew how to get his cooperation.

  UMI EDGED OUT of the darkness at the end of the hall after watching Maggie disappear around the corner. She had been right not to trust her. But there was another part of her that was impressed by the woman’s tenacity. Umi had no idea what Maggie had heard while in the hold, but she could guess. Her guards were all professionals at what they did, but she was asking more of them than even she wanted to. They weren’t spies, they were weapons.

/>   The head guard, and Umi’s true head of security, Mr. Morgan, stepped out into the hall just then, appearing surprised to find his employer skulking in the darkness in the middle of the night.

  “Mrs. Tenabe. Can I help you with anything?”

  “That depends, Mr. Morgan. Are we ready for tomorrow?” Umi asked, shuffling toward the man, who towered over her.

  “We will be,” he said, casting a momentary glance over his shoulder at the door to the hold. “But I’ve been meaning to ask you. There are nowhere near enough masks for my men.”

  “Is that a problem?” Umi asked.

  “Well . . .”

  Umi could tell this was going to be an issue if she didn’t handle it right away. “How many men are we talking about, Mr. Morgan?”

  “About three dozen.”

  “Just tell them to go up on deck and stay upwind until the all clear,” Umi said, thinking of it that very moment. She wasn’t even sure if that would work, but she didn’t really care.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And are we clear, Mr. Morgan?”

  “Crystal, ma’am.”

  “Good,” Umi said. “Then I suggest you get back to work.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Morgan turned to head back the way he’d come.

  “Tell me something, Mr. Morgan,” Umi said suddenly.

  “Ma’am?”

  “What’s your take on our new security chief?”

  “Ms. Reynolds? She’s competent. Organized. But, as you requested I’ve been keeping her in the dark as far as the real mission. Has that changed?”

  “Not at all. I was just curious. Does she ask a lot of questions?”

  “Questions? No, no more than I would if I were in her shoes. She’s mostly interested in the safety of the guests as far as I can tell. Is that all?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Umi said. Morgan nodded and headed back into the hold.

  “She can tell,” a male voice with a British accent said from behind Umi. Alex lit a cigarette and stepped out of the shadows. Alex had followed Maggie when she’d left her room and reported in to Umi.