The stairs were also concrete, with a landing at the top and a closed firedoor that was also locked. “Shit,” Marcantoni said, and reached for his tools.
Parker said, “That door is going to be alarmed.”
Angioni said, “Why? I thought the whole idea was, these people don’t give a shit about security because they’ve got this whole armory around them.”
Mackey said, “No, Parker’s right.”
“Damn it,” Marcantoni said, “this is the only way in. This, and the front door. Front door for customers, this door for employees that park their cars downstairs. No other way in.”
Williams said, “This is also gonna be a firewall. Concrete block. So we don’t bypass the alarm by going through the wall.”
Marcantoni said, “We come this far. Now what?”
“We go in,” Parker said.
Marcantoni gave him a surprised look. “But you just said it’s alarmed.”
“It’ll be just this door,” Parker told him. “There isn’t any reason to link it with the entrance up at the front, so it isn’t part of a whole system, there’s nothing else to hook up to it.”
Marcantoni nodded. “That sounds right.”
Parker said, “Since it’s just this one door, there’ll be a keypad on the inside, and we’ll have thirty seconds, maybe forty-five seconds, to short-circuit it.”
Kolaski said, “I’m very good at that, that’s a specialty of mine.”
“It’s yours,” Marcantoni told him.
Parker said, “What it means is, he’s got to be able to get in there fast. Once you start playing with it, the countdown starts.”
Marcantoni gave the door lock a look of contempt. “This? A sneeze and it’s open.”
“Then go sneeze, Tom,” Kolaski said, taking out his own canvas pouch of tools, saying to Angioni, “Hold this open for me, will you?”
Marcantoni looked around to see that everybody was in agreement and ready, then bent over the lock. He worked with concentration and speed, then pushed the door open, stepped back, and said, “Go, Phil.”
Kolaski stepped through the doorway, followed by Angioni holding up the opened tool pouch. A small pale keypad was mounted on the wall to the left of the door, near the lock. Four Phillips-head screws held it in place. Kolaski chose a tool, spun the screws loose, chose a tool, popped the top of the keypad cover loose so that it flopped forward and down to hang from its wires, chose tiny alligator clips, put them on the connectors at the back of the keypad, stepped back, said, “Done.”
Angioni laughed as Kolaski put his tool pouch away. “I love a showboat,” he said.
“It’s just talent,” Kolaski assured him.
They stepped through into a space that wasn’t entirely dark, since it was spotted with red exit signs, one over the door they’d just come through. They were at a T intersection of hallways, one going left and right, the other straight ahead, exit signs over the doors at the far ends. Closed or open doors were spaced along the halls.
Angioni said, “This doesn’t look like a jeweler.”
“It isn’t,” Kolaski told him, “it’s a wholesaler. It’s more about offices and salesmen, not display.”
Parker said, “What we want will be toward the front.”
They walked down the hall ahead of them, seeing ordinary offices through the open doorways they passed. The door at the end of the hall swung inward, and when they opened it they read on its other side NO ADMITTANCE. That made Kolaski laugh: “Comin outa the No Admittance, that’s somethin new.”
Directly in front of them, beyond the No Admittance door, were three large messy desks mounted with computers and phones and reference books and stacks of sales and tax forms, flanked by extra chairs. These desks faced outward, away from them, toward a broad sales or display floor, where display cases mingled with smaller desks and cashier stations. Globe lights hung low all around the room from a high metal gridwork; these were all switched off, but lights gleamed within display cases here and there, enough to dimly illuminate the room.
Angioni, grinning at it all, said, “This is the place, all right.”
Williams said, “Does the doorman out front get to see in here?”
“No,” Marcantoni told him, “there’s a solid metal door comes down over the entrance at night.”
“So it’s all ours,” Kolaski said, “so let’s get to it.”
They all had rubber or plastic gloves, which they now pulled on. Before this, Marcantoni had done most of the touching, except for when the tables were moved, and he and the others had wiped prints away as they went, but from now on that wouldn’t be possible. They all pulled supermarket plastic bags from their pockets, two each, and started moving through the display area, picking whatever attracted their eyes.
The displays were different from those in a retail store. They gave as much space to manufacturers’ brochures and specifications as they did to the items being offered for sale. Two or three of the cases contained only different kinds of small gift boxes for jewelry, and one other presented a great variety of clasps and hooks and pins.
But most of the cases contained value. Wedding and engagement rings; bracelets, necklaces, brooches; gold money clips shaped like dollar signs, pound signs, euro signs; watches that would cost retail as much as a midsize car.
The six moved among it all like the gleaners who come through the field after the main harvest, picking and choosing only the best of what was on offer, breaking the glass that was the final barrier in their way. It had taken them more than three hours to get in here, but only twenty minutes before all twelve bags were full, looped to their belts so their hands were still free.
“A good night,” Marcantoni said, and grinned at Parker. “I told you you’d like to stick around.”
“You told me,” Parker said.
Going back, they paused while Kolaski reclaimed his alligator clips, replacing them, now that he had the leisure for it, with a simpler wire connection. Then they moved on, letting that spring-mounted door close behind them as they trotted down the stairs to the parking garage, across the broad concrete floor tinged green from the stairs sign behind them, through the nearly empty storage room, and back into the tunnel.
Now they needed the flashlights again. Marcantoni still had his, and Mackey now had the other. They shone the lights ahead, and the air floated with dust, like mist over a swamp.
“Now what?” Marcantoni said.
They walked forward into the tunnel, smelling the dry chalky dust, feeling the grit of it in their noses and mouths. Ahead, the mountain of rubble was back.
They stopped to look at it. Maybe the vibration of their passage had done it, or just the new movement of air from both doors being open at the ends of the tunnel, but something had caused a further fall from above the ceiling. Some bricks had come down, but mostly it was dirt and stone, loose but compacting. It covered the tables, except for a narrow bit at this end. Above, it sloped up and away to where the ceiling used to be and farther.
“All I hope,” Mackey said, “is we don’t wind up with some delivery truck down here with us. This is under the street.”
“We’re too far down,” Marcantoni told him. “Besides, we’re not gonna stay.” He was on one knee again, bending down, shining the flashlight under the end of table that jutted out from the fresh fall of debris. “I can see all the way through,” he said. “These things did their job.”
“They damn well better,” Angioni said. “We got no other way outa here.”
“I’ll go first with the light,” Marcantoni said, and on elbows and knees started through the tunnel-within-a-tunnel created by the tables.
“I’m with you,” Angioni said, and went down on all fours to crawl after him.
Marcantoni was the biggest of the six, and he found the space cramped under the tables, particularly with the two thick plastic bags of loot hanging from his waist. Loose rubble kept falling in from the sides, roughing up the floor, piling a few inches high here and
there to make the clearance even narrower. Marcantoni went through slowly, flashlight stuck out ahead of him, his eyes on that distant area beyond the last table, where it was still clear. He passed under the second table as Kolaski followed Angioni and then Williams followed Kolaski.
It was still falling, slight but relentless, the dry crap was still coming down, shifting this way and that. As Marcantoni reached the far end of the second table, a sudden cascade of dirt and dust streamed down in a curtain line from the narrow space between the tables, falling on his head and neck, blinding him. He jerked away, his shoulder hitting a table leg and jostling the table an inch to the left, as Mackey started to crawl after Williams, carrying the second flashlight.
More dirt fell. Marcantoni, unable to see anything, dropped the flashlight while trying to hold his hands over his face, keep the dirt out of his eyes. But the dirt was tumbling faster now down through the hole he’d widened, and more was sliding in from the sides. He kicked out, the plastic bag on his left side struck against something, and he hit the middle table. Now all three tables were awry, and the dirt thudded down into all that newly available space.
Parker was about to crawl after Mackey when Mackey abruptly backed out, one forearm over his eyes. A dust cloud followed him. Mackey veered right-ward out of its way, held the light aimed into the darkness under the table, and said, “Something’s wrong. Something’s gone wrong.”
Parker crouched, looking where Mackey aimed the light down the line beneath the tables, and they both saw nothing but the dust in there, and a spreading fall of dirt, and Williams’ legs writhing, as he struggled for purchase, as he tried to pull back from the dirt that was burying him.
“Hold the light on me,” Parker said, and slid in under the first table, crawling forward till he could reach Williams’ thrashing ankles. He grabbed the ankles, pulled, pulled harder, and finally Williams’ body began to slide along the brick floor.
Parker kept pulling, until Williams was back far enough that he could help with his own arms. Parker backed out of the narrow space, holding his breath against the dust cloud Williams caused by his movements, and Williams backed out after him, covered with dirt. “My God,” he said, and coughed. “I was a dead man.”
Mackey said, “The others?”
“It was Tom got in trouble first,” Williams said, “and then everybody else. I don’t think anybody got out, man.”
Bricks fell near them. They backed away, Mackey shining the light at the rupture in the ceiling, which was larger now, more dirt falling down. “We’re not gonna get to those guys,” he said.
Williams said, “I don’t know how you even got to me, but I’m grateful. I owe you my life.”
Parker shook his head. “I didn’t do it for you,” he said. “Forget all that. I’ll give you the truth here. What I need is a crew, the more the better. I wish I could have those three back.” Looking around at the useless tunnel, he said, “Because we’re going to have to cut that armory back there a new asshole. We have to find a new way out of there.”
THREE
1
Parker, disgusted, removed his belt so he could let the full plastic bags fall to the brick floor of the useless tunnel. Mackey watched him, frowning, then said, ’You’re leaving the swag?”
Sliding the belt back through the loops, Parker said, “What do we do with it? The people who knew who to call in New Orleans are down in there, under the dirt.”
“God damn it,” Williams said, “we don’t have the customer.”
“We don’t have anything,” Parker told him.
He hadn’t liked this thing from the beginning. Mostly, it had been the simple matter that he hadn’t wanted to stay in this part of the world after getting out of their prison, but he also didn’t like to be pressured into doing something he felt wrong about.
And it had felt wrong to him, all the way. He hadn’t known why, or what to look out for, but from the minute Marcantoni introduced the idea, back in Stoneveldt, when it was clear to Parker that he had to agree to be part of this thing or lose Marcantoni—and he’d needed Marcantoni even more then than he needed him now—Parker believed it was all going to turn sour, one way or another, before he could get clear of this place. He’d never thought Marcantoni or the others would try to keep it all for themselves, when the time came to split up the proceeds; they were more professional—and sensible—than that. But he could feel it, out there, hovering. Something.
And here it was. A building that was famous for having only one way out, and now they had to find another way.
Williams was looking up at that long ragged split in the ceiling. “The street’s up there,” he said. “Suppose we could get up and out that way?”
Mackey said, “Dig a hole upwards, over my head? Into a street full of traffic? I’ll stand over here and watch.”
Parker said to Williams, “That doesn’t work. Even if it doesn’t cave in, and it probably wouldn’t, you’ve got a hundred fifty years of paving up there, layer over layer of blacktop.”
Mackey said, “That’s why, when they want to get through it, they use a jackhammer.”
Williams stopped looking up. With a shrug, he said, “That’s the only idea I had.”
Parker said, “We’ll go back the way we came, see what we find.”
The other two got rid of their plastic bags of jewelry and they left the tunnel, went back through the mostly abandoned storage room, and into the green-tinged parking area, where Mackey said, “Maybe it would be easier to get out down here. There’s more garage space past this, for people who live in this place.”
They walked over to the exit, which was covered by a heavy metal mesh gate that lowered from a drum overhead. Through the mesh, they could see the ramp extend upward toward the street, and a bit of the dark night up there.
But there was no way through or under or around the mesh. The barrier was seriously alarmed, firmly seated into deep metal tracks on both sides, and flanked by concrete block walls two layers thick. Above, the walls met a massive ceiling that was part of the original parade field inside the Armory, capable of bearing the weight of a company of horses, or tanks.
“We don’t get out down here,” Parker decided, and they went back upstairs, through the door Marcantoni had opened and Kolaski had unalarmed. Just inside that door, they stopped to look around. Halls extended away ahead of them, toward the display area where they’d been, and to both left and right.
Mackey said, “I think we gotta explore all these doors along here.”
Williams said, “They won’t lead out.”
“Maybe we’ll find something we can use,” Mackey told him, and gestured to the hall on the right. “I’ll take a look down there.”
Williams said, “Parker?” Pointing at the two halls, he said, ’You want this one, or that one?”
“I’ll do the one straight ahead.”
They separated, and Parker went forward to the first door on the right, which was closed. Opening it, he felt a wave of warm air come out, and when he found the light switch beside the door he saw that this was where the company’s on-line operation was kept. The room was mostly empty, with free-standing metal shelves along both side walls like the ones fronting the tunnel door back in the library. On the shelves were bulky dark metal boxes that ran the wholesaler’s Web site, displaying the wares and making the deals with customers anywhere in the world.
The machines also gave off heat, which was drawn away by a fan inside a metal grid high on the opposite wall. Mackey still had the flashlight, so Parker went down the hall until he found an open door with an ordinary office inside, took a gooseneck lamp from there, and carried it back to the Web site room. The outlet he found in there gave him just enough cord so he could aim the lamp through the grid to see what was inside.
A powerful-looking fan, attached to a solid iron A-frame, was mounted in the middle of a rectangular galvanized duct, about thirty inches wide and fifteen inches high. Using the lamp, he couldn’t see very far i
nto the duct, but it did go upward at a fairly steep angle, straight back from the grid.
It had to exit the building. It would angle up until it got above the ceiling of the other rooms back here, then run straight to an outer wall. Some sort of screen would have to be set up at that far end. With bars on the outside? Some sort of protection, anyway.
It would be a very tight fit, and it might have some impossible corners in it, and it could end at an opening it would be impossible to get through. There had to be something better than this.
Parker left the lamp on the floor in there and tried the door across the hall. The mail room, plus copier and fax. Nothing of interest.
The other four rooms along this hall also offered nothing of use. One near the front was where the staff took its breaks, with a refrigerator, coffeemaker, sofas, and chairs. The refrigerator contained some snack foods, which they might get to later on.
But not much later on; they couldn’t afford to stay in this building a whole lot longer. They’d started this operation a little after six, and it was nearly eleven now. If they were still in this place after five in the morning they were in deep trouble.
The other three rooms were offices of various kinds; accountant, manager, and personnel, it looked like. Parker went through all the desks, but found nothing that looked like a control to open the garage exit downstairs, which would have been a simple way out. But nothing.
He was coming out of the last room, the manager’s office, when Mackey came down the hall, saying, “You know what you’ve got down there to the right, you’ve got an apartment.”
Parker said, “Somebody lives here?”
“I don’t think so,” Mackey said. “Not usually. It looks like the owner, a guy named Jerome Freedman from what it said in there, things I looked at, he keeps the place for any time he might want to stay over in town, or maybe when they do inventory here, or whatever. But it’s a complete one-bedroom apartment with a full kitchen. Looks as though nobody’s used it for a while.”
Parker said, “Anything useful in it?”
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