by Joseph Flynn
Disappoint Jean Morrissey on this investigation, she might be the one to ask for his resignation. On the other hand, if he tied up the case with a ribbon and a bow, he might get a promotion as his reward. He wouldn’t mind a bump in pay, but he wanted to remain an investigator not become an administrator.
DeWitt said, “I would have told you anyway. So you’ll be in step with what comes next.”
John nodded. “I’d do the same thing in your place.”
The deputy director smiled. “Kindred spirits, that’s what we are. We ran the photo of that robber your mother unmasked through our databases.”
“I tried it on NCIC without any luck,” John said.
“We struck out there, too. Then we ran it through military records, passport files and some other electronic archives I really can’t mention. No luck anywhere.”
John shared his idea that maybe the hackers working for the other side might have lifted the robbers’ file from any government records where they might normally be found.
“I thought of that, too. Caused quite an uproar when I mentioned it. People are checking that right now.”
“I had another idea,” John said.
He told him about asking Ellie Booker to check popular media sites to see if there was a match for the robber’s face in a place the other side might not think to look.
“You think they might turn up in IMDb?” DeWitt asked with a smile.
Referring to the Internet movie database.
“I don’t know. Thought it couldn’t hurt to look.”
“Yeah, you’re right about that. Our tech people used the picture your mother gave us as an example of the right way to strip away the warpaint and makeup from the other robbers. That and add appropriate skin shading. I should have the results within the hour. Let me know if you get anything from Ms. Booker. If you don’t find anything, we’re going to put all the robbers’ images on TV and the Web. Ask the public for help finding these guys.”
More than anything else, that told John how much pressure was coming down from the top.
DeWitt gestured to his car and asked if he could give John a lift.
He accepted a ride back to the Mirage to pick up his car.
John checked his phone for voice mail or texts from Ellie Booker.
Hoping for but not receiving any information on her database searches.
Captain Grunwald, however, left a message saying the sketches done by the choreographer had been dropped off at John’s hotel.
— Chapter 26 —
J.W. Marriott Resort & Spa, Las Vegas, Nevada
John felt like going for a swim. His talk with DeWitt had made him tense, feeling a sense of urgency he’d never known before. Not as a special agent for the BIA anyway. He still got night sweats sometimes when the terror of being left out in the wilderness as an infant to die, almost consumed by a coyote, fought its way past the intervening years and found him again.
He’d heard from many people how they couldn’t remember their early years.
He wished he could forget his earliest day. Not that he had detailed recall. But the sense of mortal dread remained undiminished.
PTSD from the cradle onward.
Swimming would be a pleasing way to relax the tension, but he’d have to wait until the blazing desert sun was no longer directly overhead and he could take his sunglasses off. The radiance was barely tolerable even with his Ray-Bans on. He’d wait until twilight. See if he had the time for a dip then.
The hotel had an Irish pub called J.C. Wooloughan. John stopped in for lunch and found a table in a quiet corner. He ordered a corned beef sandwich on rye and a bottle of Arrowhead sparkling water. He opened his laptop. The lighting in the pub struck a happy medium, comfortable on his eyes and adequate for reading from his laptop screen.
He called up his email and found a message from Louis Mercer with multiple attachments containing eight hundred and ninety-two proposals for nonfiction books.
Comprehensive, John thought. Would have been nice if Louis had narrowed things down for him a little. He couldn’t complain, though. He’d been delegating tasks to a lot of other people throughout this case. Getting a pile of work handed back to him, he could hear his father’s voice.
“Son,” Haden Wolf had told him, “what goes around comes around.”
He hadn’t understood at first. Mom clarified it for him in biblical language, “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.”
Both parents had taught him not to complain when he had to do the heavy lifting. He started by creating a file that combined all the individual proposals under one heading. Then he did global searches for the words bank robbery, thefts, stealing and cyberattacks.
Bank robbery brought up no returns. Theft brought up one that was off topic. Stealing returned a proposal that included stealing bases, a baseball book. Cyberattacks produced twenty-three hits.
John paid his lunch tab, leaving a handsome tip for not being disturbed as he’d occupied the table for hours.
He went up to his room to read the proposals on cyberattacks.
To see if anyone thought of using them to facilitate other crimes.
After reading the book proposals and speaking with DeWitt earlier that day, John’s thinking about the bank robberies began to crystallize. Eight so-called Indians were the public faces of the crimes. A ninth accomplice drove the truck that carried off the cash, costumes and motorcycles. Behind those guys, according to DeWitt, stood the People’s Liberation Army of China. They were the ones who bore the official responsibility of doing that country’s computer hacking.
DeWitt had told John the PLA had already hacked its way into the Pentagon and any American tech firms worth mentioning. It was as if the Chinese had backed up a gigantic truck to the USA and were heisting every piece of the country’s intellectual property worth having. On top of that, the bastards ran an annual multibillion dollar trade surplus with America going back, roughly, to the Pleistocene.
It was enough to —
Make John laugh when he looked at it from the perspective of a Native American. A bunch of damn foreigners was stealing the country out from under the noses of the locals? How dare they? The irony might be comical, but most of the continent’s original inhabitants wouldn’t be any more pleased to have the Chinese running the show than they were now.
It’d be a long damn time before they got their buffalo back from those people.
John wondered if the robbers knew for whom they were working.
He doubted it. They were more likely driven by the profit motive than the struggle for the triumph of the proletariat. Knowing the robbers were probably good capitalists might give him some leverage in the end. But wait a minute …
There had to be one guy — the truck driver? — who was the interface between the domestic crooks and the foreign commies.
He might be motivated by both money and ideology.
John had read those were common traits among the elite in Beijing these days.
He got up from his computer and went out on the balcony to look at the mountains. He let his eyes relax with a bit of long-distance focus. The peaks were brown and red in the lowering sunlight. He glanced down to look at the lush gardens and adjacent golf course surrounding the resort. It was amazing what a hundred million dollars could do to rehab a desert landscape.
Create a reasonable facsimile of Eden with low humidity. The pool down there, a vast expanse of crystal blue water, looked quite inviting, too. Time for a swim, John thought.
Then he’d come back to his room, order a room service dinner and look over the choreographer’s sketches of the robbers. He’d pay attention to the static images of the way they moved, and how that one guy used his reverse jazz hands.
First, though, not having packed for water sports, he had to call down to the hotel gift shop and see if they had swim trunks in his size. As big as he was —
They did. He said he’d be right down.
He didn’t get there. Byron DeWitt called.
“My people checked out Penn to see if Carl Gugasian, the Ivy League bank robber, had any acolytes or groupies. Turns out he did. Sort of.”
John sat down to listen.
— Chapter 27 —
The Hook & Plow, Seattle, Washington
Corey Price drove a subcompact rental car up I-405 from Tacoma to Seattle. He was on his way to meet Lamar Dekker in the gastropub of a waterfront hotel that was a lot fancier than the economy motel he was staying at down the road. The hotel valet had to force a smile when he took the key to Corey’s little tin bucket.
That left Price trying to decide whether he should tip the kid big when he picked up his wheels, show him he was a sport, or just stiff the condescending little prick. When Price walked into the pub, he saw Dekker sitting in a booth at the back with two glasses of beer in front of him and two more on the other side of the table. Happy hour.
Price slid into the booth feeling anything but cheerful.
He downed half of his first beer anyway.
“What the hell is a gastropub?” he asked.
“Means they serve craft beers, the kind of beef you don’t get in chain places and fish that came out of the water this morning.”
The beer was damn good, but Price wasn’t about to let that settle him down.
“I’m done,” he said.
“Because you never could stand prosperity, right?”
Price finished off his first beer, thinking there was a good deal of truth to Dekker’s gibe.
Dekker just sat there looking at him until Price had to concede, “We have made some good money, but that asshole with the cell phone in New Orleans and the wannabe hero guards in both banks —”
“They got you nervous, huh?”
“It’s different when you’re on the field, Lamar, not just watching from the stands.”
Dekker said, “That picture-taking prick in New Orleans? I’m thinking about maxing out all his credit cards. Show him there’s a price for everything.”
That made the two of them laugh, but Price stopped first.
“I suppose you could do the same to me,” he said.
“Yeah, I could, but you’d know who did it.”
Price took a sip of his second beer. Looked at Dekker over the top of his glass.
“You’ve learned a hell of a lot since I first met you,” he said. “You keep surprising me what you can do with a computer.”
Dekker shrugged. “I give it all I’ve got. Just like I do with everything. That’s the only way I’ve ever accomplished anything. You know what I mean. You’re the same way.”
“I’ve always overdone everything,” Price said.
“Your leg still bothering you?” Dekker asked.
“Not so much. I had this little Japanese massage therapist work on me last night. Felt a whole lot better until she gave me the bill. I looked at the number and asked if she was charging me in yen.”
“Didn’t get your knob polished, too, did you?” Dekker asked.
“Strictly therapeutic. Made me think I should take some massage classes myself. Pays damn near what we’ve made the past few days.”
Dekker took a roll of cash out of a pocket and peeled off three Ben Franklins.
Price let the money sit on the table.
He said, “I hope you’re not dipping into other people’s money. Living high off our earnings.”
“Sticking strictly to my share.”
“You’d better, because I can still stomp you flat.”
Dekker grinned and took a sip of his beer. “Would’ve been interesting, we both got into it when I was younger. But you’ve got the edge now. I ever get wind you’re coming for me, I’ll head straight home. You’d never find me there.”
Price caught the eye of a waitress. Ordered another round and drained his glass.
He looked at Dekker. “You’ve tasted the big time, Lamar. You have to spend your life hiding out in the woods, that’ll be punishment enough.” He pushed the money to the other side of the table.
Dekker let it sit there. “We have just one more job planned. The take for this one could be as much per man as the first two combined. That’d make a nice bundle for all you guys to take into whatever you want to do next.”
Price sat silent and thought about that.
Dekker went on, “I’ll make out okay regardless. You probably won’t do too bad for yourself. Maybe find a niche in one of the towns on the circuit. The others probably won’t be as lucky as us … and you know they won’t do another job without you. Who else would tell them what moves to make?”
Price did know that. He felt responsible for the others. Dekker had approached him; he’d been the one who got the guys to go along.
Still, he said, “After the last two, it’s gonna be harder to surprise anybody.”
Dekker smiled. “Wait ‘til you see what I have planned this time.”
Price put up a hand. “I don’t want to know. Not until I have to.”
What scared him, what he didn’t want to admit even to himself, was the idea there was someone a whole lot smarter than Lamar Dekker standing in the shadows. Playing all of them for suckers. Ready to cut and run, leave the chumps for the cops to catch, if things got too hot.
“It’s gonna be all right,” Dekker said. “We’ll all walk away with better than a hundred grand each. Tell me where else you could get that kind of money.”
Nowhere else, Price thought. “One last job, then we go our own ways.”
Dekker nodded. “Won’t bother you if I buy dinner, will it?”
Price shook his head.
“I promise,” Dekker said. “We won’t have any reunion parties.”
Price grinned and said, “Yeah, fuck you, too.”
“Never figured you’d be the guy who got the jitters.”
“Me neither.”
What Price wasn’t about to tell Dekker or anyone else was that his agent had called again that morning. The movie producer who’d optioned his book got the money to finance his movie of Price’s story faster than he’d ever expected. They looked good to go for filming. The book deal, as a result, was going to kick in a six-figure bonus as soon as the movie deal was announced. Price sure as hell didn’t want to screw all that up.
If he hadn’t been so close to the other guys for so long …
If they all hadn’t shared the same frustrations and disappointments …
But they had, and Price couldn’t let himself be the guy to fuck them over one last time.
So he went along with the plan and let Dekker buy him the best damn steak he’d ever eaten. They’d placed their orders when the waitress had come back with four beers instead of two. She’d said, “Good timing, you just squeaked this order into the last minute of happy hour.”
Dekker raised his glass and said it was a good omen.
Price joined the toast.
Their meals came and they ate and drank and talked of better days to come.
Leaving the pub just minutes before the national news started on the TV behind the bar.
Showing a spot-on picture of Tut Warren and identifying him as one of the robbers who had struck banks in New Orleans and Las Vegas.
— Chapter 28 —
J.W. Marriott Resort & Spa, Las Vegas, Nevada
DeWitt told John that a Chinese graduate student at Penn, working on his Ph.D in sociology and criminology four years ago, had compared the modalities of organized crime in the United States and China. His dissertation had included a prominent section on Carl Gugasian and how an individual malefactor might organize his illegal activities in a fashion more common to larger criminal enterprises.
John said, “Maybe there’s a place of higher education for crooks, like that old movie ‘School for Scoundrels.’”
DeWitt picked right up on that. “Sure, they could confer MCA degrees.”
“Master of Criminal Administration?”
“You got it.”
What they both had now was the grad student’s
name: Cheng Zou.
Cheng’s research might have been nothing more than honest intellectual inquiry, but neither John nor DeWitt was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. If the scholar was still in the United States, he’d soon be talking to federal agents. If Ellie Booker’s research turned up Mr. Cheng as a fellow who’d gambled and lost big in Las Vegas, the questioning would be intense.
Not five minutes after John’s call with DeWitt had ended, his room phone rang.
Captain Eric Grunwald was in the lobby and had information for John.
“Come on up.” He gave the Metro cop his room number.
John met Grunwald at the door and ushered him into the room.
The Metro cop looked around. “Nice digs. You hit the casino yet?”
“That’s not my thing. I’ve been trying to get in a swim, but haven’t managed to do that yet.”
“Well, you stay out of the casino, you’re ahead of the game in this town.”
Words of wisdom that made John think of Cheng Zou again.
Reinforced the feeling the Chinese doctor of philosophy had played a part in the robberies.
“You were right,” Grunwald said.
“About what?” John asked.
“NVEnergy, our power company, told me there was a small-area power failure that began thirty minutes before the robbery at Desert Mountain and lasted thirty minutes after it was over.”
“So your patrol people are going to canvas the area where the surveillance cameras and the lights went out?”
“I have units doing that right now, but my thinking is they’re more likely to find someone who spotted the truck during the workday on Monday. Saturday night and Sunday, the people who might have seen it are likely to be somewhere else.”
“You’re right,” John said. “If I didn’t mention it before, we’re searching for a semi-trailer rig that might look just like this.”
He used his laptop to pull up the photo of the truck belonging to the guy that Marcellus Darcy and Edmee LaBelle liked for the scout on the New Orleans robbery, and explained how he got it. Then he forwarded the jpg. file to Grunwald’s phone.