by English, Ben
Diane shook her head. “But with the money your parent’s left you, that’d never be the case.” She took another piece of orange. “So he honestly figured you for the ‘defenseless little wife?’”
“That’s where Bryce was odd. Always two versions of reality. I still think he doesn’t know I found out how much he was sleeping around.”
Irene brought her sister a steaming cup. “How did you find out?”
Mercedes smiled humorlessly. “I actually dreamed about it. Then he left some stuff at home one day when a shoot was canceled, and I followed him.” The smile dropped from her face. “When I tried talking to him about it, he . . . started yelling. Broke a lamp, then he started hitting me.” Before her cousin could say anything, Mercedes looked up fiercely. “Irene knows. I filed a police report through her when it happened. You’re the only other person I’d tell this to, Diane.”
The other woman bit her lip, orange forgotten. “I’m so sorry.” She seemed about to ask a question, then thought better of it. “But you were okay. He didn’t—”
Now Irene grinned. “She gave him a black eye, honey.”
They both laughed. Mercedes found she couldn’t join them.
“I had a doctor’s appointment a few days afterwards, and had him check my ribs and arm. He said I was all right.”
They were quiet a moment. Mercedes placed a section of fruit in her mouth and chewed slowly. Irene finally spoke up. “It was bizarre to see how quickly Bryce changed after that.”
“Yes, he seemed to be happy for the divorce. Anything to get me in a courtroom and drag out a simple procedure. I’m sure he thought I’d try to punish him somehow, and he’d get a chance to sic his lawyers on me, have them paint me as a gold-digging harpy.”
“Harpy?” Diane raised her eyebrows.
“His word, not mine. You should have seen his face when we met with our lawyers–so they could at least make this pitiful offer to settle--and I turned down everything. Alimony, the works–except for my house in Studio City. I was entitled to more under California’s community-property laws–half of what we made together while we were married.”
“And that was a lot?”
“Enough to matter to Bryce, and he’s always been bored with money. Between his portfolio and my business, we did pretty well.”
Irene frowned. “I remember when you called last month, right after you’d been on the phone with him.” She looked at Diane. “It’s why I asked Mercedes to come up here with me.” To Mercedes she added, “You really needed a vacation from that guy.”
“Yeah, it’s pathetic. He still keeps trying to get us back together. Our old friends do, too.”
Diane said, “He’s a pretty big guy to be calling pathetic. I still say you should get a restraining order.”
“Maybe,” she conceded. “I just don’t want to be one of those women they find murdered with their restraining order the only thing still in their purse.”
The teakettle whistled, steam escaping. Diane, closer to the range, moved to get it. “Are you sure you don’t want some tea or coffee?”
“No, thanks,” Mercedes also stood, smoothing nonexistent wrinkles out of her blue t-shirt and jeans. “Not supposed to drink coffee. Doctor’s orders. ‘Sides, I don’t think I should think about Bryce and have a bunch of caffeine racing around inside me. I might do something desperate.”
Irene met her grin. “I’ve always thought of you as a desperate woman. Your dad’s papers are on the desk in Grandpa’s study.”
*
He’d been such a careful man. It was so like her dad to have sent copies of his research to his own father for safekeeping. Mercedes read through the titles: “Wave Stochasticity and Linear PlasmaMaser Effect.” “Electromagnetic Forces on Plasma Particles in the Presence of Controlled Resonant Plasma Turbulence.” Et cetera. Mercedes would need a doctorate in physics herself just to understand the titles.
That wasn’t entirely true. As the only child of two brilliant minds, Mercedes had picked up quite a bit. Her parents had never been reticent about their work in front of their daughter, and had always treated her as if no subject was beyond her comprehension. The three of them had discussed everything from whether or not a certain purple dinosaur had three green spots or four to the basics of superconductivity.
She knew her father had received his greatest acclaim for inventing a method for feeding energy to satellites from the earth’s surface. The patent for that contraption had taken care of college and the down payment on Mercedes’ bungalow in Studio City. Though she’d donated most of her parents’ white papers and research documents to people who could actually make use of them, such as the men and women at California’s Intercampus Institute for the Research of Particle Acceleration, she kept a few—for nostalgia, if not for recreational reading. From time to time one or another of her parents’ colleagues would call and ask to review a fine point of data. She’d kept all their phone numbers, with a promise to pass along anything new she discovered.
“Let’s see,” Mercedes said to herself, flipping through pages of her address book. “Vernon Eby, Manal Teobi, or Mitch Fenn.”
She decided on the latter. With his floppy haircut and dimpled chin, Mitch reminded her of the actor Chevy Chase. Fenn had been as close a friend as any to her family, and still sent her a card with a handwritten note every Christmas.
Mercedes picked up the phone.
Loose Ends
Southern Bohemian Region, Czech Republic
5 PM
It had taken Brad a long time to get good at this, and it was finally beginning to pay off.
A heron sailed by, veering away from the willow tree and the knot of concealed men, crossing over the river. Lights from the shadowy compound glimmered sullenly across the steel-gray skin of the waterway.
Brad leaned into the sway of the willow and raised his head up just enough to see over the crumbling stone-and-mortar wall. He moved with painstaking caution, though the security guard strolling along the inside of the modern fence two hundred yards away was looking at his feet and no doubt anxious to finish his last sweep of the perimeter. It had been over four hours since the guard’s last break, and only two minutes remained until shift change, when he could finally go home. Night was falling, quicker than usual, thanks to the storm clouds in the western sky.
The guard—Brad searched his memory for a name; Vaclav--was visibly tired and riding the careless line of boredom. Brad pushed a black strand of hair back under his hood and watched the man stumble. He was perfect.
“This country’s version of Rent-a-Cop,” he whispered unnecessarily to Gan, motionless against the next tree. Gan, also dressed completely in black, responded with the barest of raised eyebrows, then thumbed the switch on his radio.
“Begin, Marko.”
Brad immediately turned his attention towards the purling river, though it would be another five minutes yet before any change would become apparent. “This will go well. Tomorrow you will have vacation for the rest of your life.”
His older brother responded in their native Mandarin. “Just watch yourself, Zhihuan.”
Brad returned to his contemplation of the guard, but inwardly frowned. No one but Gan called him by that name anymore. He checked the straps securing all the equipment to his narrow, whip-thin body. That name. He hadn’t been that person in a long time. Not since their mother and eldest brother had died under a tank’s tread in the spiritual center of a country they’d called home.
Gan was too sentimental, and too ill-timed. Foolish of his brother to remind him of the past when they were on the brink of a job.
“We will yet drink tea together,” Brad whispered back in the same language, then dropped from the tree.
Behind him, four other men also began to move. He and Gan, with the help of their other brother, Li, who was back in the truck babysitting the computer expert, had hand-picked this little group out of the best the Prague underbelly had to offer. They’d chosen their Czech accomplices carefully, not only f
or their expertise at breaking-and-entering, but for their popularity with the local police. With any luck, the discernible style, techniques, and overall flavor of the larceny would be so marked by the mannerisms of their Czech comrades that the three brothers could slip away unnoticed. Despite the old cop adage about criminals always making at least one mistake, the brothers stood a good chance of going 100% undetected, as long as one of their local friends wasn’t caught and forced to sing.
Which was unlikely, as their target in this remote corner of the Southern Bohemian forest was, for all its secrecy, a branch plant of an American corporation currently out of favor with Czech officials. Why should the police care? The obscure location and the fact that nearly everyone at the plant was an American national virtually guaranteed a sluggish response by the local constabulary. The Americans were scientists, engineers; technocrats who snootily kept to themselves in their rented compound in the nearby city of Brno. Come Monday morning their first reaction would be disbelief, then shock that their technology had betrayed them. Heh. Brad had thought of everything.
Industrial espionage could be such fun.
Before him, beyond the ancient, pitted stone wall and another sloping 100 yards or so of low brush lay the Czech campus of DynaSynth, Inc., manufacturer of synthetic diamond. One huge, red-brick building laid down in an L-shape, at least three stories tall, with segmented steel bay doors at either end that extended nearly to the roof. From his research into the industry, Brad knew the enormous doors were necessary to bring in the twenty-ton presses that would force graphite dust into diamond. The steel presses themselves–machined in America–were worth several million apiece. Brad was after something considerably smaller, however since he’d begun planning the theft five months previously he’d occasionally wondered what it would be like to steal one of the gargantuan, octagonal presses.
The wind blew down river, cool against Brad’s face as he ran against it. He pulled up the mask portion of his cowl. The thickly-woven ninja suit combined with the greasepaint under his eyes kept him warm enough. He led the four men at a brisk, silent run across ground that had once been a mass grave, a boneyard of a medieval war.
Brad had studied the territory, memorized everything about the factory he could lay his hands on.
DynaSynth fabricated synthetic diamond, specifically the small, cylindrical diamond-tipped inserts that fit on the ends of drill bits used in mining oil and natural gas. With drilling still a staple industry in Eastern Europe, the U.S.-based company had recently opened this plant to better service their customers in the area. According to stateside accounting files that a friend of his had cracked into last week, DynaSynth recently received seven million dollars worth of orders from the Ukraine and Eastern Russia. Business was booming and the stockholders were delirious.
Another heron flapped by overhead.
Brad had no compunction about stealing from large corporations. His target had nothing to do with the main supply of revenue for DynaSynth, and the tiny diamond inserts were such a specialized product that he could only fence them to the original customer. No, what he was going to take physically amounted to only a few thousand dollars at best, and that paltry sum was more than covered by the company’s insurance, swallowed up in the morass of accounting procedures that went along with such a large company. Nearly a year earlier, DynaSynth stock had been quietly bought up by the Raines Dynamic, a development firm with resources that were--for all intents and purposes conceivable--bottomless.
And bottomless bureaucracies made the best targets.
He reached the base of the old wall and turned slightly, jumping and then kicking back off one of the supporting pillars. The apex of his rebound gave him enough height to snatch the edge at the top of the wall and swing himself over, smooth as glass. Under his balaclava, Brad grinned. His heart was pounding, and he felt effortless, light as a feather despite the twenty-five pounds of gear distributed in the various pockets of his black ninja suit. He moved to the side as the second man came over the wall. Ninja, that’s a good one, ‘cept those guys were Japanese. Not that the guards inside the fence would know the difference.
Two months earlier in Las Vegas he’d had a similar thought, sitting at a blackjack table next to the sweating, chubby man who would soon be plant manager of DynaSynth-Czech. Roland Mmar was built like an apple: a thick-lipped, multi-chinned chap with a mop of thick, greasy blond hair and a ridiculously tiny waist. By the time Brad joined him at the table, Mmar had downed at least five Manhattans and lost upwards of twelve thousand dollars, though as he’d informed his new Asian friend, “Blackjack is my game. I own it.” Then he’d given Brad what he obviously considered a traditional Japanese greeting by bowing until he fell heavily from his stool.
“Bet you Japsters do that all the time.”
The man was a boor. Over the course of the evening, Brad arrived at a new respect for the fierceness with which he could come to loathe another human being in so short a time. As he coaxed and cajoled the man into revealing details about the Czech plant, he learned to dislike Mmar’s gibbering laugh and sloppy table manners. The fat man actually won a few hands, but lost his biggest payoff when he spilled a drink all over his ace of diamonds and nine of spades, and quit the table to get a new Manhattan.
And although the man obviously managed his employees as a bit of a tin-god tyrant, Brad discovered Mmar knew surprisingly little about his own plant. He and Gan had found out much more by enlisting another sometimes-business partner, a computer specialist named Steve Fisbeck, to help them research the site. The actual security computers, like many of the systems inside the plant, were stand-alone and therefore unreachable over the ‘Net, but the strict accounting documents Mmar insisted on were easily cracked into. The files in the computer of DynaSynth’s receiving department, when added to copies of the blueprints and the ramblings of a slightly drunk plant manager told the team of burglars everything they needed to know.
Brad led his four companions at a quick pace through the maze of brush and long grass. The plant was built on a swell of ground, over the battered ruins of a castle erected, according to local belief, by the Knights Templar. The foundation was the same, still capable of supporting several tons of steel machinery after a thousand years.
An added inducement to the plant’s construction was the nearby river, from which the designers planned to siphon off enough water to cool the various grinding machines in use, piped in through the old moat bed. The new brick building above looked just as bleak as the castle probably had, squat yet looming on its extended knoll.
By the time they reached the river, the water level had dropped remarkably. The black-clad figure in the lead smiled again to himself as he began leaping from stone to stone towards the open drain on the other bank. Gan was a genius. Damming the water upstream just enough to expose the inlet tunnel had been his idea from the start.
Brush on the steep hill above shielded them from discovery due to an unscheduled pass by the guard, though Gan would have radioed a warning if that happened, or if the regular activities at the plant differed in any way from what they had observed over the past week.
Brad was certain his little band was in no danger from the motion detectors set outside the fence or from the two cameras sweeping the wide, manicured grounds.
That was another thing. The three brothers hadn’t had any trouble finding the factory. DynaSyth had hired a local landscaping company out of Prague, and the finely-trimmed trees and perfect lawns stuck out as much in the scrubby, overgrown forest as the corpulent Roland Mmar had in that casino in Vegas. Brad and Li had spotted it in their first sweep over the timberland by helicopter nearly two weeks previous. The Southern Bohemian forest was four thousand square kilometers of trees and scrub, but DynaSynth was no needle in a haystack.
Brad paused at the tunnel’s mouth and allowed one of the hired hands from Prague to lead the way. Paulos, the smart one, held a flat, narrow bar of instruments ahead of him as he walked, scanning for infrar
ed or ultraviolet sensors. Ahead echoed the scraping, grinding hum of heavy machinery.
It wasn’t a long walk in the dark, just a straight shot through to the open-ended filtration system. Unlike his companions, Brad could manage to stand completely upright and sidestep the shallow pools that had gathered here and there in depressions along the pipe’s length. The cobblestones underfoot and overhead were smooth–a thousand-year flow.
Paulos already had the grate unhooked by the time the others reached the end. Brad took the lead now, stepping out into an open steel tank. The air was dusty, gray, dull against the blunt concrete walls. Several sealed bins were lined up against the wall of the long, narrow chamber, labeled in Czech. The room was empty but for the noisy filtration machinery at the far end. Three grimy doors led into the grinding area, where specific angles were abraded into the synthetic surface. The group walked past an open trough filled with black, frothy sludge and passed cautiously around a bend, into a wide storage area.
They were following the general L-shape of the building, moving away from the part of the building where Brad knew all the employees would be gathering before they left work. During his conversation with Mmar, he’d learned that all the plant workers had to submit to a physical security check before they were allowed to leave. Brad shook his head. What a fascist.
Another filthy door led them into the plant proper, though this area of the manufacturing floor was dark and as yet unused. Stacks of unopened equipment and crates of parts rose thirty feet to the roof. This part of the plant, at least, was clean. Each man wiped the soles of his feet with an absorbent cloth. Footprints wouldn’t do, here. One of them stifled a cough, and Brad nearly did the same. The filtered air had a strange, slightly acrid taste, as artificial as the pale concrete wall around them.
With a wave from Brad the men divided to their various assignments. Their primary goal lay directly ahead of them, up a flight of stairs to the engineering offices, but Brad was a firm believer in always having a plan B.