by Joseph Flynn
“You still there, Special Agent?”
“I don’t really know if I have a brother. I was adopted as an infant.”
“Oh. Sorry. Listen, I’ll just say thanks for the help. You made me look good.”
“My pleasure,” John said. “If you don’t mind my asking, how’d your bad guys get the restricted animals into the country?”
“Cargo ship out of Indonesia. Paid people over there and over here to look the other way.”
John said goodbye … and wondered if he might have a sibling. Brother or sister. If so, where might that person live? And would he care to meet him or her?
Marcellus Darcy settled on the bench next to him. He’d brought his laptop, too.
He said, “Looking out at that river is a good way to start thinking about all sorts of stuff.”
John nodded and asked, “Your boss going to let you keep helping me?”
“He says I can work with you as long as you’re here in town. Says he doesn’t have a travel budget.”
John nodded. “Not everyone gets to work for a glamour agency like the BIA.”
Marcellus grinned. “I’ve always thought that’s something, Indians having their own lands and their own cops.”
“Would’ve been nicer if we got to keep Manhattan and Disney World.”
Marcellus booted up his computer. He Googled the ten most popular makes of motorcycles in the USA. Found the bikes he saw the bank robbers on within minutes. Gave John the URL.
John went to the site and read aloud the information he saw there.
“Indian motorcycles. Made by Polaris Industries. Medina, Minnesota.”
“They have your kind of Indians up there?” Marcellus asked.
John said, “There are Native Americans in Minnesota: Chippewa, Ojibwe and Sioux. My biological mother was Northern Apache. My biological father was maybe Navajo. I never met him.”
Marcellus laughed. “Welcome to the club. Anyway, the bikes I saw had that Indian guy in the headdress on the gas tanks.”
“The Chief Dark Horse model. This gang has a motif going, that’s for sure. But a motorcycle that starts at $28,000? That’s more than most people pay for their cars.”
“Maybe they used the loot from some other jobs to pay for their bikes,” Marcellus said.
John tapped his keyboard to send an email. “I’ll ask the FBI to see about other banks being robbed by guys on motorcycles. Ask them to check on stolen Chief Dark Horse bikes, too.”
“They’ll do that for you?”
“Sure, I’m their favorite Indian. They like that I keep them in the loop.”
Marcellus asked, “You won’t mind if they catch these guys?”
“I focus on the work. That’s what matters to me.”
“You don’t care about getting famous, huh? You must be rich.”
“I pay my bills. Have enough left over to go my own way.”
“Must be a comfort. Them motorcycles I saw looked good, but they might have had a few years on them. If they were legal rides, maybe they were bought used.”
John thought about that and nodded. “Lots of people are poorer these days than they were a few years back. Maybe the robbers bought bikes from sellers who had to readjust their lifestyles. Got their fancy rides at discount prices.”
Marcellus said, “I can see that.”
“Let’s move on to the robbers’ helmets,” John said.
Marcellus Googled motorcycle helmets. That search took a bit longer. Then he found what he wanted. “This is it, I think. They all had the same one, I’m pretty sure. Covered up their faces, not just their heads. Looked expensive. Had lettering on them. Couldn’t read the word ‘cause they were going too fast. But the look of it was like this.”
He showed the photo to John.
He brought up the web page on his computer.
“Shoei Air-GT Wanderers. Six hundred bucks a pop. Multiply by eight robbers, add sales tax and you’re talking five grand or so.”
Marcellus whistled. “These boys do like to travel in style.”
“Yeah,” John said. “So we’ve got eight guys roaring along on expensive bikes wearing flashy helmets. Question is, where’d they go? Captain LaBelle told me that NOPD and the state police neither saw nor received reports of conspicuous bikers racing down any local street or interstate highway.”
Marcellus laughed. “In this town, there could be ghost riders in the sky and nobody’d look twice. Or maybe they just hid out somewhere close to the bank.”
John shared the information he’d received from Aggie Bing.
Then he said, “Sitting here, looking out at the Mississippi River, I wondered if they didn’t get their bikes out the same way some people sneak things in, on the water. And then there’s one more thing to think about.”
Marcellus knew right where John was headed. “The ninth guy in the gang. I’ve been thinking about him.”
“Yeah,” John said. “The Indian who turned out the bank’s lights and clogged the streets. How do we find him?”
Hard & Fast Fitness, North Las Vegas, Nevada
Corey Price sat in an ice bath in a quiet corner of the men’s locker room. He’d been immersed in the frigid water, ice cubes bobbing all around him, for ten minutes. That was long enough for most hard core athletes, young guys who went in for extreme sports. Nobody was supposed to extend exposure beyond twenty minutes. Price sometimes wondered if he should try lasting twenty-one minutes just to see what happened.
Standing outside the tub, Lamar Dekker peered down at Price. “Your wienie tucked up between your lungs yet?”
“Haven’t felt it since I got in,” Price said.
“You might want to thaw it out and use it again someday. Maybe just to make frozen margaritas.”
Price laughed. “Bad as this is,” he said, “it beats pulling a hamstring. Be embarrassing to limp out of a bank I just robbed.”
“Yeah, that’d be the shits, especially if you couldn’t swing your leg high enough to get on your bike.”
“You see the news about this Louis Mercer asshole?” Price asked.
Dekker nodded. “We should’ve thought about cell phones. You bend over these days, someone will show you a picture of your hemorrhoids.”
“We still gonna do the next job?”
“You tell me,” Dekker said.
“The guys are all up for it; so am I. What about you?”
“Yeah, me too. I’m having fun.”
“No worries?”
Dekker grinned. “Other than going to jail for the rest of my life? No. You and the others, you’re the guys who could get shot.”
Price nodded. He’d thought about getting killed. Told himself it’d never happen.
Seemed more likely when someone else said it out loud.
Then Dekker added, “I’d miss you and the boys, something bad happened.”
He showed his sincerity by offering a sad smile.
The sight of which raised a question in Price’s mind. Where’d Dekker get his new movie-star set of teeth? His old ones had been gray and snaggled. The new ones must’ve cost plenty. But the plan was, none of the stolen money got spent until after they did their last job. Then they’d count it out and divide it up with everybody watching. Nobody would complain he’d been shorted.
Price asked, “Who fixed your teeth? Who paid the bill?”
“Found a dentist that gives credit.”
Yeah, right, Price thought. He thought maybe he should jump out of the tub and hold Dekker’s head under until he got a straight answer. Only, cold as all his joints were, he wouldn’t be moving too fast, and right now Dekker was the only one who knew where the money from the New Orleans job was.
Wouldn’t be a good idea to scare the guy off.
Price said, “You know how this cold therapy stuff works?”
“Makes you too cold to feel any other pain?”
“No, it’s a combination of what they call vasoconstriction and reflexive vasodilation. Squeezes the lactic a
cid out of your muscles and then brings in more highly oxygenated blood.”
“That was going to be my next guess,” Dekker said.
Back when Dekker had first brought Price the idea of robbing banks, Price had asked Dekker how he would manage pulling off all the diversions he’d mentioned. Taking down a power grid while turning all the traffic lights green. Seemed like something you’d see in a movie.
Dekker had said, “I went back to school the past few years.”
“On top of your trucking business?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh.”
Waiting to hit the bank in New Orleans, Price and all the other guys had to clamp down on their bladders not to pee their pants. They’d put their faith in Dekker, but only up to a point. He hadn’t delivered on screwing up a whole city, they wouldn’t have gone into the bank.
Sonofabitch came through, though, and it was just like a movie. Traffic jammed up all over the place. Crashes and fistfights everywhere. Cops couldn’t get anywhere except on foot. Maybe in the air, too. But with all the chaos on the ground some guys riding motorcycles wouldn’t draw any special attention.
Fact was, they hadn’t been the only ones riding bikes up on the sidewalks. Inside the bank, even with that one guard trying to be a hero, everything had gone as slick as the path to hell. It’d been a real ass-tickler, being the dudes to pull off a heist like that. None of them had touched a drop to drink for a whole day before the job but they were all stoked on adrenaline for hours afterward.
Couldn’t stop laughing.
Looking back on it all now, Price wondered exactly how Dek had pulled off his end.
What kind of school taught you how to take down a city?
Even if there was one, would Lamar Dekker be up to mastering the lessons?
Fucking guy didn’t even know about vasoconstriction.
“So we’re all good for the next job?” Dekker asked.
“Yeah,” Price said.
“You’re turning blue, man. I was you, I’d get out of there.”
Price did, but he needed Dekker’s help.
Still, he’d made twenty-one minutes.
Port of New Orleans
“Don’t let no one drop a shipping container on you,” Lieutenant Gaston Rule told John.
“You’re going to let me wander around by myself?”
“While you were in the men’s room, I called my chief.”
He meant the chief of the Harbor Police, the department that provided security for the port.
“And?” John asked.
“And you got some juice, brother. Chief called Homeland Security in Washington, and guess who they called.”
“The vice president?”
Rule looked like John had spoiled his story. “That’s right. Her chief of staff said to render all possible assistance.”
John returned to his original point. “So you intend to let me roam free?”
“If you want, I’ll escort you anywhere you want to go. My only other experience with federal agents, though, they like to go their own ways.”
John decided he would, too. He’d just watch out for heavy lift cranes hoisting shipping containers. That and any number of motorized vehicles racing about the motorways of the port. To provide at least a token of safety, Rule lent John a hardhat.
Before John left the lieutenant’s office, he asked, “Were you hit by the power blackout here?”
Rule nodded. “I was in the first Gulf War. You remember that, Operation Desert Storm? I was with the 22nd Support Command. Man, we moved everything you could think of, personnel and machinery. I thought that was the toughest job I’d ever have. But when the power went out here the other day I about soiled my drawers. Because I knew if things stayed dark long all sorts of hell was going to roll out across the whole country.”
The lieutenant backed up his fears with relevant facts. The port handled the largest volume of cargo in the country. Three hundred and eighty thousand jobs, nationally, were dependent on cargo handled at the port. Goods arriving in New Orleans were shipped coast to coast by rail, trucks and barges.
Stepping out of port police headquarters, John made sure to walk only where he saw workers walking, and kept his eyes open and his ears cocked. The port was a living thing, a vast monster, twenty million square feet of cargo handling area. Over three million square feet of covered storage area. Almost two million more square feet dedicated to leisure cruises and parking areas.
Every corner of the port was filled with the workers and the machinery needed to keep it running smoothly. Inside of ten minutes, John knew he’d never be able to find the eight Indian motorcycles used in the bank robbery. They might already be at the site of another intended bank robbery or headed to the far side of the world.
It would be just as unlikely that a computer search of the cargo passing through the port would turn up the bikes. If someone in the shipping chain had been paid off and had entered the bikes as something innocuous with the equivalent weight, say tractor parts, they would never be found.
Now, he could only hope the motorcycles hadn’t left New Orleans as cargo on a ship.
Underlying his personal task was the growing realization of how damaging cyberwar could be. If the Port of New Orleans could be brought to a screeching halt, so could any other port in the country. He imagined the air traffic control system could be taken down, too. And if the power grid in general was vulnerable …
Life in the United States would become pre-electric.
Modern society would be unable to cohere or even to communicate.
For a moment, John wondered if some Native American mad genius wasn’t behind the robbery after all. There were those among tribal peoples who believed the white man’s dominance was no more than a passing thing. Eventually, things would return to the way they’d been before the arrival of the first ships from Europe.
Native Americans would resume their traditional roles.
Reverence for the earth, water and sky would be restored.
Buffalo would return by the millions.
To be honest, given a country without electrical power on demand, John liked the chances of Native Americans better than those of any other ethnic group.
Only that scenario assumed the rest of the world would be in the same fix.
Any sizable country that was able to defend its modern infrastructure while all the others succumbed would hold dominion over the world. They would call the tune. Everyone else would dance to it.
Returning his hard hat to Lieutenant Rule, John had a new understanding of the dimensions of the case he was working.
— Chapter 16 —
Renaissance Arts Hotel, New Orleans
John called Deputy Director Byron DeWitt from his suite.
He asked, “How all-seeing is the NSA these days?”
“It’s more like all-hearing, and I don’t know. Couldn’t tell you, if I did.”
John told DeWitt about his conversation that morning with Marcellus Darcy about the bank robbers. “What I’d like is to have your FBI people look into any thefts of Chief Dark Horse motorcycles. That’s what Marcellus saw them riding.”
“We already checked on your earlier request,” DeWitt said. “Guys on bikes robbing banks. There were lots of individual guys using single motorcycles. One loving couple, male and female, both drug dependent, tried to get away on the same bike. She was too stoned to hang on and fell off, scattering their take. He helped her up, after he collected as much of the cash as he could, and that’s when the cops grabbed them.”
“Proving flawed chivalry doesn’t pay?” John asked.
“Not after pulling a bank job anyway. We have one instance of three guys robbing a bank, each trying to get away on his own bike. Might’ve made it, too, except a guy driving a catering truck barreled out of an alley, late for a charity luncheon, not worrying about whom or what he might hit.”
“He nailed the robbers?” John asked.
“They ran into the side o
f his truck. Killed two of them. Third one’s serving twenty years in prison and life in a wheelchair.”
“And the truck driver?”
“With any other victims, he’d have been locked up, too. But he got his charge knocked down to reckless driving. Interesting thing? The luncheon was for the police benevolent league.”
John laughed. “Instant karma.”
The deputy director said, “You want anything else besides theft reports on Chief Dark Horse bikes? They could have bought them, you know.”
“Marcellus said the same thing. If the Thibodeaux State Bank was their first job, I’d agree. If they have a history of stealing things —”
“Point taken.”
“Even if they didn’t steal the motorcycles, there’s the question of how they came by their fancy riding helmets. Maybe they bought all of them at the same time.”
“Or the helmets might have fallen off a truck,” DeWitt said.
“Might have, but hijacking a truck would have been an unnecessary risk, and how could they make sure they got sizes that fit right? Buying from a fence would be taking a chance, too.”
DeWitt said, “Good points.”
“That’s why I was wondering: Does Washington have the computing and snooping power to track down a single purchase of eight motorcycle helmets from the same manufacturer and retailer?”
“Interesting question. I don’t know. Maybe if I ask politely I can find out. Of course, if hijacking didn’t appeal to the robbers, maybe they bought their helmets separately from different stores and paid cash.”
“I asked myself about that,” John said. “If they bought them through bricks and mortar retail stores, unless they used surrogates, which would be another risk, they would be showing their faces to store security cameras. On the other hand, nothing is easier than buying online. Shop for the best price on the helmets and pay only one shipping charge. Watching their money might have been a consideration before they hit the bank.”