by Jack Slater
He glanced at his watch after four minutes had passed. “You sure you didn’t try and warn him, Charlie?”
“You were listening,” the man protested. “I said exactly what you told me to.”
“Uh huh,” Trapp grunted. “For your sake, I hope so.”
The wrought iron gates at the front of Banks’ mansion began to move, inching at first, before the remotely-operated mechanism built up a head of steam. He tensed, wondering if the Odysseus CEO’s motorcade was about to blast out.
Instead, a modest gray sedan car exited the compound, followed shortly after by a somewhat more masculine black pickup truck. Trapp reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out one of the Motorola radios they’d used previously. “We’ve got movement. Looks like the bodyguards leaving, right on schedule.”
“Copy that, Hangman,” Ryan replied. “We’re waiting.”
The two vehicles drove away, and Trapp resisted the urge to follow them. He wondered if Banks had truly swallowed the bait, or whether this was an elaborate counter-ruse. There was even a possibility that the Odysseus chief himself might be in one of the two cars, perhaps hiding in the trunk to avoid detection.
He grimaced. The reality was this was the only way. Assaulting a million-dollar Bel Air mansion defended by an elaborate security system and three highly-trained mercenaries was always a non-starter. Snatching Banks while he was on the move was equally impossible. The whole world watched the OJ chase unfold on live television, and Trapp had no intention of reprising the role of the white Bronco.
Hitting him at the office was equally impossible – since that office was a heavily guarded desert compound.
So that just left the current plan: subterfuge.
The gates began to close again but stopped halfway.
“This him?” Trapp asked softly.
Dawes just shrugged like a sulking child. His posture said it all: how the hell am I supposed to know?
Two men exited the grounds of Banks’ mansion on foot. This was the sticky part. There were three other residences that looked over this section of the street. Two of them were on the opposite side, and if things went to plan, their view would be blocked by the chassis of the SUV he was sitting in.
That just left the third, and the interior lights had been dark all evening. That didn’t mean no one was inside, but it seemed like a risk that was worth taking. If they played their parts right, a casual observer shouldn’t even be sure that anything had happened at all.
“It’s him.” Trapp spoke into the radio handset. “Twenty seconds.”
Looking up, he caught Dawes’ attention. “Flash the lights.”
Dawes reached to the side of the steering wheel and flicked the lever several times, causing the full headlight beams to flash on and off, intermittently bathing the side of the street in light. He paused and questioningly turned to face his captor. “Enough?”
“Eyes front,” Trapp hissed. “Roll the window down a couple inches, and when he gets here, tell him to get inside.”
The man twisted back, gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles. Trapp continued observing the street through the tinted windows, safe in the knowledge that he was invisible both from the bodyguard and Banks himself.
Was he missing anything?
Surely not. If Banks suspected something, there was no way that the man would risk his own safety. At least, Trapp didn’t think so. The C suite type never did.
The bodyguard remained a couple steps behind his charge. He was unarmed, but constantly swept his gaze across the street. Trapp wondered what was going on in his mind and hoped he was paid not to ask too many questions. That would make things easier.
Banks slowed as he approached the Chevrolet’s driver window. Dawes lowered it slightly before needing to be prompted, and yelped, “Get in.”
The CEO’s aggravated tone was evident even through the glass. “I’m not going anywhere until you –”
Dawes leaned forward and hissed, “The feds are on to us, you understand? I ditched my tail. Now get in the fucking car so we can talk.”
Trapp watched out of the corner of his eye as Ryan’s rented pickup truck entered his vision. It was a little down-market compared to the vehicles that were usually seen in this neighborhood, but not enough so to attract any attention.
He held his breath.
Banks froze with his fingers on the SUV’s door handle. One of the vehicle’s window posts was blocking out his view of the man’s face, but Trapp could imagine the emotions roiling within him. He swore and pulled the door half-open.
“Sir, I need to check the vehicle,” the bodyguard said, his voice hesitant. Trapp looked him over. He hadn’t reached for a weapon – at least, not yet.
Too late.
The pickup truck sped up, and the motion caught the man’s attention. It squealed to a stop a few feet away from him, and before it stopped moving, two black-clad men jumped out, one armed with a pistol, the other a rifle.
“Down on the ground,” Ryan said, issuing the command calmly and aiming his pistol dead center in the bodyguard’s chest. The other man, who Trapp knew to be Conrad, circled into his blind spot with deathly silence. “I’ve got you, we both know it. Just do as I say.”
Banks didn’t wait; he leapt into the Chevrolet and yelled at Dawes to drive, his complexion ashen. His face wrinkled with confusion when the colonel did nothing, leaving the vehicle resolutely in place.
Trapp took his eyes off the scene unfolding in the street and leveled his pistol at the back of Banks’ head, keeping the weapon close against his body to guard against the unlikely possibility that Banks might do something stupid.
He grinned. “Sorry, Jeffrey. Not today.”
53
“Remember,” Caldwell murmured as pleasantly as if he were speaking to his own children. “If you try and warn them, I will put a bullet through your temple. If they try and rescue you, I’ll make sure you’re dead before even thinking about how to get my own ass out of here. Understood?”
Jeffrey Banks’ knuckles flexed around the leather-coated steering wheel of the Chevrolet SUV. He looked like he was on the verge of hyperventilating.
“Now relax.” Caldwell grinned. “You play ball, all this will be over before you know it.”
The threat was left unspoken, but nevertheless it hung in the air between them.
The guard post leading into Odysseus’ Copper City training camp was an oasis of light against the darkness of the Mojave Desert backdrop. In the backseat, Trapp wondered whether the guards would simply recognize the two-vehicle convoy and open the gates without stopping it.
In the event, however, Trapp was forced to – slightly – adjust his opinion of the quality of Odysseus’ workforce. The gate post remained firmly in place, as did the two steel bollards which were set up to disappear into the road surface upon command, tiny LED lights blinking on top.
Banks rolled down his window to just above halfway, as instructed, and left the SUV’s interior lights off. They were banking, no pun intended, on whoever was on duty recognizing the CEO and skipping any further checks. Just in case, though, Trapp angled his weapon so that he had a shot through the gap between the headrest and the window.
It would be loud.
And what if he’s innocent? How far am I willing to go?
“Good evening, sir. We weren’t expecting you,” a uniformed guard said, slightly breathless. The man had good trigger discipline, Trapp noted, and the weapon looked well-maintained, at least from this distance and in the dark.
Chalk another one up for the bad guys.
“Big project,” Banks replied, only slightly inclining his head. He was clearly tense, which Trapp hoped that the guard would interpret as mere rudeness, rather than anything more nefarious.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the guard murmured apologetically, practically blanching. “But I’m going to need to check your ID. It’s protocol.”
“This is why I usually take the chopper,” Banks grumbled. “Y
ou don’t recognize me?”
The guard’s voice went supersonic. “I do sir, it’s just –”
“Forget about it,” Banks huffed, reaching between the two front seats. He pulled out an identity badge on a lanyard and handed it through the small gap in the window.
“Thank you, sir,” the guard mumbled, scanning the badge with a pocket flashlight. “That’s all in order. Can I see –?”
Banks fed a little gas into the engine, which roared dutifully in turn. “I’m on a schedule. Unless you suspect that I’m not who you know I am, that I’ve somehow faked my own ID badge, then I suggest you open that gate and let me through, or I will have a conversation with your supervisor first thing tomorrow morning, and I suspect you will be out of a job by lunch. Do we understand each other?”
The guard gulped, already stumbling backward into the gate shack. “Yeah – yes sir. Have a good night.”
Ten seconds later, the concrete security posts started dropping into the road, and the gate was out of sight. Banks rolled the window up, securing them all behind its tinted glass, and picked up the pace.
“Masterfully done, Jeffrey,” Caldwell said, clapping the man on the shoulder like they were partners in crime. “You keep up the good work, maybe I’ll have to have a word with your supervisor.”
Banks said nothing. He guided the SUV through the otherwise empty base, passed only once by an empty-bedded heavy truck, and pulled the short motorcade to a halt inside a row of weapons bunkers that were sunk into the bedrock under the surface of the desert and hidden from the rest of the base by an outcropping of dark brown rock that stretched about eighty feet high.
“This is it?” Caldwell asked softly, his neck never stopping, almost owl-like in the way it scanned 360° for threats.
Their captive reached out and pointed at the nearest of the bunkers. “It’s that one.”
“Let’s move,” Caldwell grunted when he was satisfied they were alone.
Trapp opened the door and jumped out as Ryan did the same on his side. Once his boots were on the asphalt, he conducted his own scan of the area, but neither saw nor sensed any sign of human activity, other than the faint whine of electrical generators somewhere in the distance, carrying in the empty solitude of the desert.
“What about patrols?” Caldwell asked, though they’d already run through everything Banks knew a dozen times.
“I told you,” the man replied irritably, gesturing at his expensive suit. “Not my department. Do I look like I write the fucking patrol rotas?”
“Is there space inside the bunker for the vehicles?” Caldwell fired back, seemingly unruffled by Banks’ intransigence.
The man squinted at the two SUVs, then shrugged. “Yeah. I guess so.”
“Then open the damn thing up.”
The Odysseus CEO did as he was told, scuffing his formerly gleaming leather shoes against the dusty road surface as he adopted the walk of a sulky schoolboy. When he reached the thick steel surface, bisected by a thin seam, he went to a small access door just to the left and flipped open the cover of a small keypad. He glanced over his shoulder conspiratorially.
“I don’t care what the fucking code is,” Caldwell hissed before Trapp had the chance. “Just open it up.”
Banks punched in a sequence of digits, and then pressed the bottom right button with his thumb. Nothing happened for two full seconds, and then from inside the concrete and steel structure came a low hum.
The two steel doors slid slowly apart, the mechanism exquisitely quiet despite the fact it was hauling several tons of metal.
Trapp didn’t bother waiting until it was finished. He stowed his pistol, then climbed into the driver’s seat of the front SUV where Banks had previously been seated and started the engine. He put the headlights on low and drove the vehicle nose first into the yawning cavern. As he entered, the beams illuminated a pair of wooden pallets covered by tan canvas sheets, stacked side by side at the far end of the bunker.
He killed the engine but left the lights on and jumped out over the vehicle for the second time, drawing his pistol as he did so. Once the sound of the second engine died away, and all that was left was the breathing of half a dozen men and another groan as the door rollers began to reverse their arduous journey, the onetime weapons bunker had an eerie stillness.
“This place have lights?” he asked once the door was closed.
“Yes,” Banks replied, frowning. “But I never turn them on.”
“You get someone else to wipe your ass for you too, huh?” Chino said acidly, holding a flashlight in his left hand as the other balanced on top of his cane. He turned it on and hefted it into the air, playing the beam around the room. He jerked his head at the wall and focused the light at a gray metal console. “There.”
Trapp twisted his neck to check that the bunker doors were closed, then yanked down on a lever that looked like it had been here since the forties. Overhead, a series of more modern strip lights blinked into life. As the current entered the fluorescent tubes, they were first suffused by a dull glow, which was accompanied by an aggravated groan before they truly blinked into life.
He grimaced, initially shielding his eyes from the sudden explosion of light overhead. It took them a couple of seconds to adjust, but when they did, he properly saw the room’s only contents for the first time: two lonely wooden pallets, stacked high, and wrapped first in a layer of plastic wrap that just poked out from the bottom of the canvas. They filled only a fraction of the large space.
Conrad walked over and crouched down in front of the nearest of the two. He let out a low whistle. “Boss – you better come check this out yourself.”
Caldwell glanced at Trapp, who nodded, striding forward and placing a firm hand on Banks’ shoulder. “I got him.”
The Delta Force commander strode toward his fellow operator, stowing his pistol in his waistband as he did so. The weapon’s grip stuck out as he squatted down. “What is it?”
“Look,” Conrad grunted, stretching out a finger and tracing it along a line of ink-stamped writing on the light-colored wood. “Here.”
The colonel peered closer, holding on to the sides of his glasses to get a better look. He held there for several long seconds, far longer than was necessary to read the short line of text.
“What does it say?” Trapp called out.
Caldwell pushed himself to his feet, then strode over to the captive, jabbing his finger against the man’s chest. “You mind telling me why those pallets have the words US FEDERAL RESERVE stamped on them?”
“You know the answer,” Banks moaned pitifully.
“I knew you’d stolen millions of dollars of cash, and I’m guessing it’s sitting right there. What’s left of it, anyway. I didn’t know you’d stolen it from the fucking central bank.”
“It wasn’t my idea,” Banks said, looking up at the men arrayed around him in a loose semicircle almost pitifully.
“You didn’t do anything to stop it, though, did you?” Chino bit back. Banks had nothing to say to that.
Caldwell scrunched up his face in a malevolent glare. “I don’t really care whose idea it was, Jeffrey. I want to know where it came from. How the hell did nobody –?”
“Notice?” Banks cut in, accompanied by a bitter laugh. “You’ve been there, right? To Iraq?”
“I have,” Caldwell confirmed, a tic quivering metronomically on his right cheek. “I’m guessing we didn’t cross paths much.”
“I was only in the Green Zone,” Banks said, tacitly agreeing with the man’s criticism. “But you couldn’t miss it, even from there. The whole country was falling apart, and it was only getting worse. The sewers were out, we blew up the electricity grid, and then we disbanded the whole fucking army. Anyone we kept on, the Iraqi government sure didn’t have the cash to pay them.”
“Yeah, so we stepped in,” Caldwell said with a firm nod of the head.
“And how do you think we did it?” Banks sneered. “Got everyone’s bank details and paid
them directly? Or maybe we wrote them all a check… No. It was cash. Cold hard cash, and billions of dollars of it. The Fed printed plane load after plane load of the stuff. It was under tight guard until it got to Andersen Air Force Base.”
“But not after that, I’m guessing?”
“It was like the Wild West. Finch jacked the first truckload. Sixty million in hundred-dollar bills. To this day, I’m not sure anyone even noticed.”
“So it was open season, right?” Chino spat. “Just another business opportunity, and who cares if innocent people got caught in the crossfire.”
Banks opened his mouth to reply before he apparently realized he had nothing to say. It hung open for a few seconds before Col. Caldwell cleared his throat.
“Gentlemen,” he said calmly, carefully catching Chino’s eye as he spoke. “This is a conversation that needs to be had, but maybe let’s stow it until later. I don’t think I need to remind anyone that we’re still in enemy territory. Okay?”
Chino was visibly shaking, but he gritted his teeth together and gave a single curt nod in reply.
“Good,” Caldwell said. “First things first: I’m no bank teller, but I’m guessing we’re going to need a bigger vehicle if we want to move this cash out of here. And I like that option a whole lot more than letting someone here find it.”
“I’ll go,” Trapp volunteered, feeling that he’d somewhat lost control since Ryan had brought Caldwell on board and feeling the urge to make his own path once again.
“I’ve got your six?” Ryan said, his voice rising hopefully in pitch at the end.
Trapp paused for a second. “Okay.” He pivoted on his foot and turned back to Banks. “There must be a vehicle depot around here, right?”