“The hell I am.”
54
Sydney fixed the glasses on the party and the dance stage partially visible through the trees. Now she was looking for the exulted one among the movers and shakers. She and Marco were between two huge boulders, just in front of a copse of lodgepole pine.
From where they were, she could clearly see the outdoor movie screen that Thorp had set up behind the dance floor and band. It was the scene where Nick Carraway and Gatsby talk after the party…and the famous line of Redford’s Gatsby. Though she couldn’t hear the line, she knew it. “Can’t repeat the past? Of course you can.”
“Where are you, Thorp, you miserable bastard?” Sydney asked quietly.
She turned back to Marco, who was working on both a small laptop and an iPad. “How’s it going?”
“So far, so good,” Marco said. “I’m going to bring down the entire system. You need to contact our girl, see if she can get away and meet us. I’m bringing the systems down in a few minutes. Hopefully.”
Sydney sent Kora a text. While waiting for a response, she watched Marco. He worked fast and sure, like he’d done this many times before. She wondered if it hadn’t been for her, if he had gone to his uncle’s without running into her, if he would be with them right now. If, given his background, what he’d gone through in Mexico, that working on the other side of the law was just as easy for him.
It always amazed her when she ran into intelligent, hardworking criminals. Something in their childhoods maybe sent them off on the wrong track. All that energy and brains could as easily have gone into legitimate professions.
This guy was different. He’d had legitimate ambitions and experience and had gotten sidetracked by the murder of a colleague, just as she’d gotten sidetracked by corruption and the murder of two potential witnesses. That line she’d never anticipated crossing even for a moment had been crossed. And what was scary was how easy it was as long as there was some powerful motive.
“This program,” he said with a note of satisfaction, “isn’t readily available on the market. You need someone like Dutch, who has connections, to get one of these. I’ve seen it used. It’ll pick up signals, run them through the mill, find out what they are, what they do, and then we’ll kidnap the whole system. Basically, you ride the signals to their destination and then you’re operating like any good hacker.”
“You’re in?”
“Yeah. I’ve co-opted the program. Thanks to Dutch, we’ve already gotten all the security protocols in the system. Something went wrong, he could get in and fix it without having to reinvent its brain. But that’s the one big vulnerable spot. Somebody gets to Dutch, they get to the system. We did, and we have the access ID program that can capture and compromise the system without triggering an alarm.”
“How fast?”
“Superfast.”
“This works, you can have your way with me later.”
He smiled at her. “Didn’t I already have that pleasure?”
“That was just a little foreplay to the main event.”
“Sounds scary.”
Sydney smiled. “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
He pulled her over and kissed her hard on the mouth. “I am.” Then he said, “Let’s do this.”
55
Leon stared at the blank screen on the smartphone. One minute he was running his finger across the screen bringing up every room, every outside nook and cranny, and the next, he had nothing.
“Sonofabitch did it, brought it down,” Leon said. “He’s good.”
Kora said, “We’re getting close.”
Leon slipped out on the side of the veranda, rested the night scope in the opening of a latticed panel, and tracked along the shoreline, working up to the trees.
He finally found them—white figures in a greenish soup. The boy and his girl doing their thing. Nice. It passed through his mind to kill the bastard and Jesup, then go back to the clients and play it all off as a neat little setup.
But then he figured it was just a throwback thought. He resisted it. Chastised himself. He was moving on. Keep focused, he told himself. He never liked second-guessing himself and rarely did, but this whole situation in Tahoe was a brand new ball game. He’d never turned against clients before. Never even considered it.
He looked at Kora, his girl, his little schemer, and what he saw was excitement in her eyes and a slight grin on her mouth.
“What?” Kora asked, seeing his look.
“You made me think of Xenia the Janus agent, the chick in James Bond’s Goldeneye who liked to squeeze her adversaries to death with her powerful legs, and in so doing would have orgasms.”
She laughed. “Better watch out, dude.”
He chuckled. “Here they come. Man is gonna get a bit of a surprise.”
“He’s going to be pissed, for sure,” Kora said. “Just don’t kill him. We need his skills. We’re only halfway there.”
He watched the thieves all cool and confident.
Twenty million and Kora. And a new life. Could buy a fucking island. Maybe he’d get one of those manmade deals the Arabs built in Dubai that looked like a palm tree in the water. They were going cheap with the economic mess the world was in. He could live like a Sultan. Hunt when the mood came over him, or when somebody in the world pissed him off enough. Be his own man, his own boss.
Then, when he went hunting, it would be solely because some asshole somewhere was being too stupid to live.
Leon the Professional felt blissful. It was one of the happiest feelings he could remember. He had a girl. He’d soon have millions. It was like a whole new world had opened up and blessed him.
Still, he really wanted to kill these two for breaking his face, humiliating him, causing him all this misery. It was going to be difficult restraining himself. If he succeeded in that restraint, it wouldn’t be for the money, it would be for his sweet, knockout little Xenia.
56
Sydney followed Marco between sumptuous flower gardens and fishponds, around a sand trap, and headed for the side of the Rouse house, accompanied along the way by the band doing a Duke Ellington number. They paused. A hundred yards away, they could see Mia Farrow and Robert Redford, Daisy and Gatsby, talking on the giant movie screen behind the band stage, the last couples standing attempting to dance the night away.
Sydney took the glasses and scanned the dancers, the crowd in front of the platform, then on past the tents to the gazebo, and up on the long, second-floor balcony. That’s where she found Thorp and Rouse. “I hope you bastards are enjoying your party,” she said quietly. “I get my way, it’ll be your last big celebration.”
They continued toward the lawyer’s house—two stories of marble and sandstone and vast windows. Marco approached the side door, the B&E bags bumping against his sides. He stopped, with Sydney just off his left shoulder with the other bag and equipment.
Marco made quick work of the side door by breaking through the long window using tape and a glass cutter.
“We’re in,” he said quietly.
They didn’t get more than three steps into the room when a female voice in the dark said, “Nice work.”
“Kora?” Sydney said.
“It is I,” she said.
Why didn’t she open the door, let us know she was there? Sydney wondered.
Kora emerged from behind a massive statue of a Roman soldier that stood at one side of the entrance to the next room, a naked statue of a woman on the other side, both over six feet tall. Sydney didn’t like something in Kora’s demeanor, maybe the inflection ion in her voice, the way she stayed back, still partially behind the statue. Something felt very wrong.
Then a man emerged from the dark into the faint light of this outer room. He wore a plastic mask and had a weapon in each hand, one pointed at her, the other at Marco.
“The thing is,” a raspy, strained voice emanating from behind the mask said, “I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead. But you aren’t dead, which means this is your l
ucky day. We need to work together.”
Kora, now fully out into the open, also had a gun.
Sydney realized with shock that the man in the mask was the one they had fought. He was not only alive, stunningly enough, he had hooked up with Kora North. How in hell had that happened?
The idea that Thorp had orchestrated this trap was difficult for Sydney to accept. Yet here they were. She expected Thorp to emerge from the room next.
“Welcome to the Bank of Rouse,” Kora said, moving closer. She was dressed in white, a little hat perched on her head, lipstick bright red, hair cropped. A hot Daisy. “Leon here made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Isn’t that right, baby?”
Her new friend whispered hoarsely, “That’s right, Daisy, my little sweet pea. Man knows when he’s met his match.”
Kora smiled, teeth gleaming from the refracted light coming from the party next door. She looked magnificently evil.
“Sorry,” she said, “but a girl’s gotta do…and don’t worry, this is going to be a win-win situation. We’re all going to get what we want. Isn’t that right, baby?”
“That’s right, Daisy, win-win. Let’s go get into Tricky Dick’s bank and see what’s for Christmas.”
Sydney now began to see a different picture. This wasn’t Thorp. This was the two of them!
She sensed Marco wanted to make a move but now wasn’t the time. She gave him a look.
“Do everything nice and slow and careful,” Kora said, apparently seeing what Sydney was seeing in Marco. “We don’t want to kill you, right Leon?”
“That’s right, we don’t want to kill the golden goose who’s gonna bring us the golden eggs,” Leon muttered. “They make any moves, they’ll die, and that’ll be too bad. I see your shoulders getting tight, which means you got some Rambo shit in your brain. Best back down. Daisy sweet, if he makes some dead-hero move, I’ll do him and you do his lady.”
“Be my sad pleasure,” Kora said, bringing her weapon to bear on Sydney’s face. “But they’re gonna see the smart thing to do. We’re not here to shoot you guys. We have a proposition you can’t refuse, believe me. My good friend Leon has decided that it’s time make a change. A little revolution in which the workers take over and the rich assholes get what they got coming to them, right baby?”
“Socialism for two.”
Kora chuckled. This was fun and games to her.
Marco said, “Sounds like it should be for four.”
“It will be, if you play along,” Kora said with a smile.
“Now that we all understand each other,” the guy she’d called Leon said, “let’s remove weapons. Then we can take a look at the office.”
They stood there for a tense moment.
“How many weapons you got between you?” Leon asked. “Be honest. I hate people lying to me. Makes me do bad things.”
With great reluctance in his voice, Marco said, “Three.”
“Well, let’s get you disarmed. We don’t want any failure to communicate, as Newman put it in Cool Hand Luke.”
Sydney didn’t know what the hell the deal was, but obviously these two had formed some sort of sociopathic bond. They were working like a couple with a very good sense of each other. How in hell had that happened?
Leon told Kora how he wanted her to remove their weapons. He made them get down on their knees, hands behind their heads.
Marco had his gun belt-holstered in the front under his shirt. Kora reached around and took it, and in the process felt him up, chuckling like a kid. She took his two, then came over and removed Sydney’s. “We’ll work this out,” she said.
Then Kora, having removed all three weapons, went through the bags looking for more weapons. She didn’t find any. “They’re clean,” she said. Then she turned to Sydney. “You brought what I wanted?”
“Yes.”
Leon said, “Let’s go, folks, we have work to do. Money to make. Places to go. Right, sweet pea?”
“You are right, old sport.”
57
“Leon isn’t a break-in artist on your level,” Kora said to Marco. “He might get into the office, but no way could he get into that safe. Isn’t that right, Leon?”
“That’s right.”
“Leon isn’t his real name,” Kora said. “He took that from a movie. I’m thinking of changing my name as well.”
“I think she should call herself Xenia,” the masked killer said.
Chatty couple. Having fun. Who’s really running the show? Sydney wondered. They had really underestimated and misread Kora North.
They were ushered at gunpoint into the vastness of the great room. She feared the killer wanted his revenge, and might take it at any moment, but was forced to delay until he had what they came for. At least it might buy them some time.
They paused under the vaulted ceilings, moon shadows spilling across the tiled floor, a cut of light on the grand piano. The rooms of the house had low nightlights. Statues from Asia and some Italian stuff. Paintings looked like they belonged in a museum. Stuffed animals in the adjoining room.
“Here’s how this works,” the smothered voice from the mask said. “Kora here has convinced me of a new plan. See, the thing is, I’m not all that fond of my clients. Right, Kora?”
“That’s right, baby. Leon doesn’t like Thorp or his lawyer much at all.”
“So,” Leon said with muffled exuberance that resembled a cartoon character, “we’re going to work something out. I wanted to kill the two of you for breaking my face, but Kora came up with a way you can pay me back. And pay me big time, right Kora?”
“That’s right,” Kora affirmed. “That’s exactly right.”
Aren’t they the cutest couple outside of a fucking asylum? Sydney thought.
“Turns out,” Leon said, “we’re all on the same side of this.”
A strung-out killer and whacked-out hooker taking over the world. Gonna pull off the robbery of the century.
Sydney said, “How is it we come out ahead?”
Kora said, “Relax. We get the money and enough dirt on these guys to protect us, and you get enough to destroy them. That’s your end. Everybody gets what they want. Everyone goes home happy. So let’s quit wasting time and get in that office and see what we have.”
Kora North was definitely running the show, Sydney decided.
Marco answered Leon’s garbled questions as he went along. How he used the density meter, and then methodically studied the framing. Leon kept back so Marco would have no chance if he decided to try something.
At the safe, it was quickly clear that the door, covered in a fine mahogany veneer, had beneath it high-grade plated steels with “engineer only” removable fixings. The locking mechanism had a punch-code lock. That was definitely the way to go.
“The lawyer isn’t big on trust,” Marco said.
He went into his bag, showed Leon the sequencer and the black light. “This code sequencer should give the numbers up pretty quick. Runs a thousand a second.”
“I’ve seen that in a movie,” Kora said. “He doesn’t have the iris reader or a fingerprint thingy.”
“Not on this door,” Marco said. “You said this was just the outside door, right?”
“Yeah, there’s a big metal door to the main office door.”
Marco studied the keys with the light and then went about fixing the box over the keypad.
“Here we go.” He pushed the ON button on the sequencer.
Leon, showing student-like curiosity, fired questions at him the whole time he worked. Like he was learning for future reference. Sydney appreciated how Marco entertained the guy, getting him involved, telling him all about the design, how they got ahold of it through a contact in the high-tech security world, keeping him focused and distracted. She wondered if he had a plan or if he was just trying to keep the guy interested.
“It’s designed to fit the universal punch codes. It could be set to any three, four, or five keys. It should find the unlocking sequence in about one
to three minutes.”
“You got that from Dutch?” Kora asked.
“He’s a man with resources. If Rouse had a retina or fingerprint scan, we’d have no choice but to do a hot caesarian.”
“Which is?” Kora asked.
“Torch cut.”
The outer door opened with no problem. But that was just the veneer. The real door was next, down a short hall. Marco grabbed his bag and Leon moved back. They reset their physical relationship, but Marco kept right on talking.
“Acetylene torches only reach six thousand degrees, and when you were working steel-reinforced concrete and solid-steel fixtures, you need thermic power in the eight-thousand-degree range. You need to handle different consistencies in the pour matter.”
“Why would they be so different?” the killer asked. “It’s cement.”
“Cement mixture is vibrated to get rid of air pockets to create a zero slump,” Marco said. “The only effective and fast way to get around dual-control and time locks is with a combination of torch and blast. But this locking mechanism doesn’t need a blast. It’s not that heavy. You’re always dealing with the endless escalation of technology. A thief has to be on the cutting edge. Crime is an arms race.”
Leon emitted a chuckle.
Marco, working intently, talked nonstop, telling Leon that it started during the Gold Rush days, all that robbing going on. Banks started using safes and then the robbers brought in the pickaxe and hammer to break in at night and steal the safes, taking them somewhere in the hills to break them open.
“So the banks built bigger and heavier safes with heavy doors that had to be blasted open. That proved easy enough to do, so the combination lock was invented to thwart blasting. So the robbers developed the technique of drilling and using a mirror shoved inside to see the slots on the combination wheel.”
“It’s nice to see you boys enjoying your work,” Kora said, “but let’s get this done.”
The Ultimate Mystery Thriller Horror Box Set (7 Mystery Thriller Horror Bestsellers) Page 95