The Loot (Charlie McCabe Thriller)

by Craig Schaefer

  “He gets that a lot, doesn’t he?”

  Beckett favored her with a thin smile. “Don’t be fooled. Jake plays the clown, but that man’s got a mind like a steel trap. Loyal as all hell too. Most of us don’t stick around for the sky-high benefits and luxurious work environment. We respect Sofia, but we follow Jake.”

  “While I’m learning the lay of the land,” Charlie said, dropping her voice to a murmur, “what’s the deal between Dom and that guy? Malloy?”

  Beckett’s smile drooped at the edges, and his eyes went bitter.

  “You know anything about the French Foreign Legion?”

  “Only the name,” she said.

  “They got this tradition. It’s a tradition Jake and Sofia like, and I’m fond of it myself. See, when you join up, your loyalty is to the Legion and your fellow legionnaires. La Légion est notre Patrie: ‘The Legion is our fatherland.’ Whoever you were before you signed on, whatever you did, it’s all in the past. Supposed to stay dead and buried.”

  Charlie nodded, catching his gist. “Supposed to be.”

  “Some fools always feel compelled to bring a shovel to the party. Just stay out of that whole mess. If Dom wants to tell you, she’ll tell you on her own time.”

  “And Malloy?”

  “I won’t partner up with Malloy,” he said, “and neither will you.”

  Her first day on the job was more of an entry-level college course than a James Bond adventure. Charlie sat for a photo, passport style, that Sofia ran through her printer and turned into an official-looking Boston Asset Protection ID card in a smooth black vinyl case with a lanyard. Next up was memorizing the briefing packet. She reached for the top copy on the dwindling stack. Beckett stopped her.

  “Not that one. Sofia printed one up special, just for you.”

  Charlie took the stapled pages, still warm to the touch. It didn’t take long for her to figure out what was missing: the plan. She had the bare-bones layout of the hotel, data on the staff, and the contract, but while her new coworkers were going over routes and schedules, she stared down at a blank map.

  “We start with the basics,” Beckett told her. “Have a seat and take a good long look at what you’ve got there.”

  Beckett left her to study in the corner of the briefing room. He popped in to check on her twenty minutes later.

  “Books closed,” he said and waited for her to shut the stack of stapled pages. “The Stark House hotel has how many entrances?”

  She closed her eyes and conjured up an image of the hotel floor plan.

  “There’s the front entrance. Valet parking, two side-by-side revolving doors plus two handicapped-accessible doorways, all glass. Employee and service entrance on the east face of the building, ground level. HVAC service access, also east facing. There’s a second service entrance for the banquet and meeting rooms: it’s north facing, connecting to a stairwell and leading into the Kennedy Ballroom.” She paused, certain she was missing something. “Wait. The hotel restaurant, Revel: they’ve got their own loading and employee entryway, isolated from the rest of the hotel, but someone could pass through the kitchen and get in that way.”

  He bobbed his head slow, his expression inscrutable. “You sure you got all of ’em?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “No windows in this hotel, huh?”

  He walked away. She sagged in the stiff-backed, hotel-remainder chair and went back to studying. Of course an assailant could get in through a window: any rookie could have seen that, should have seen that. She doubled down and got back to work.

  Beckett stepped out into the hallway.

  Dom was absorbed in her phone. She didn’t look up, but she sensed his arrival all the same. “And the survey says?”

  “Answer hazy, ask again later.”

  She lowered her phone. “That’s not Family Feud; that’s a Magic 8-Ball.”

  “All I got on me. Right now, I’d give it a fifty-fifty. Jake talked her up to me last night, and I like her bona fides.”

  “But,” Dom said.

  “She needs to figure out this isn’t the kind of job where you take your tests sitting at a school desk. I’m hoping her instincts kick in and she shows me what she’s really bringing to the table. If she does, you’ll see her at the banquet tonight.”

  “And if not?”

  “Then you won’t,” Beckett said.

  Twenty minutes later, Charlie felt Beckett looming over her. She looked up, swallowed by his shadow.

  “Pop quiz,” he said. “How many hotel employees will be on site during the event?”

  That was harder than the last question. She worked through it one department at a time.

  “The Stark isn’t a big hotel. Six on valet parking, five front desk staff . . . seven security, housekeeping will be sent home prior to the event start time, and catering is being handled by a private company vetted by Deep Country.”

  “Who vetted the hotel employees?”

  “Head of hotel security.”

  “So we’ve got two unknown quantities, catering and hotel staff, and the vetting was done out of house. You okay with that?”

  She wasn’t, but she had to assume it was par for the course. “We have to assume they did their due diligence.”

  “How many of these external employees were hired in the last couple of weeks? As in, after Deep Country announced the plans and location for this banquet?”

  Charlie froze. She thought back through the dossier. It wasn’t there. And it should have been. She should have questioned it.

  “I . . . don’t know. I don’t have that information; it’s not listed here.”

  He gave the tiniest shake of his head.

  “You going to trust your life on somebody else’s spotty intel?” He paused. “You going to trust my life on it? Hmm.”

  Charlie deflated in her chair as he walked away.

  She almost walked away too. She expected growing pains, getting into a new line of work, but this felt like playing hopscotch in a minefield. She felt like a failure right out of the gate, like she didn’t have any business being here. Maybe it’d be better to quit before she embarrassed herself any worse. It wasn’t like this back in—

  She froze in midthought. Her fingertips brushed the glossy page, tracing a map and a missing plan of attack. That was her entire problem. She was treating this like a new career, trying to come at it with fresh eyes, but Jake and Sofia hadn’t hired her for her raw potential. They’d hired her for the job she already knew how to do. A job she was damn good at.

  For a man of his size, Beckett could move like a ghost when he wanted to. His sonorous voice drifted over her left shoulder. “Presume we’re being stationed on front door detail. List the main points of threat.”

  “The doors are south facing. Angles of approach from the pedestrian sidewalk, east and west. There’s an alley one hundred yards east that can conceal an assailant or a small vehicle. Across the street . . .” In her head, she was back in Afghanistan. Remembering a hundred street sweeps, running point on patrol, watching the windows for the glint of a rifle scope. The stripped-down packet in her hands didn’t say one word about what was waiting on the opposite side of Tremont Street.

  Charlie stood up, digging in her pockets for her father’s truck keys.

  “I’ll be back.”

  Beckett studied her, curious. “We ain’t done here. You still got work to do.”

  She held up the packet.

  “This,” she said, “isn’t good enough. I never trusted my people’s lives to somebody else’s intelligence, and I’m not going to start now. I need eyes on. Firsthand intel.”

  The big man broke into a toothy, pearly smile.

  “Goddamn, I was hoping you’d say that. I was starting to get worried. C’mon, I’ll ride shotgun.”

  Ten minutes later he was drumming his fingers on the passenger’s side armrest and squinting at the pickup’s rust-spotted hood. The engine coughed like it knew it was being watched.

 
; “You gain points for initiative,” he said. “You lose points for style. Not as many. Just a few.”

  Eyes shadowed behind her new sunglasses, Charlie glanced into the side mirror and shifted lanes.

  “It’s only temporary.”

  “In the sense that we could both die when this thing spontaneously combusts,” Beckett said. “Jake says you’re living out in the sticks.”

  “Spencer, yeah. It’s only temporary.”

  “Careful,” he said. “Too many ‘just temporary’ situations can add up to living in a rut real quick.”

  She glanced at him. “I can’t be in a rut. I just got here.”

  “Just saying.”

  The Stark House was an icon of downtown Boston, a vintage monolith in shades of beige and stormy gray, with iron fixtures and window frames dating to the mid-1800s. As they rolled past in syrup-thick traffic, Charlie studied the overhanging marquee out front, the glass doors that looked in on a vast, red-carpeted lobby. Her gaze flicked to the far side of the street. University buildings sprawled beside a small public park. The tallest campus building was five stories with more facing windows than she wanted to count. The park had tree cover and thick, wild bushes: pretty to look at, and a sniper’s paradise.

  “Back at HQ,” Beckett said, “that was just a warm-up. School is now in session. Give me your assessment of the entire security plan from the ground up.”

  Charlie shook her head. “But I don’t have the plan. You gave me a blank packet.”

  “Correct. You’re a blank, too, far as I’m concerned. So I need to know how much of this job you’ve already got down, and how much I’m going to have to teach you. Need to know if you can be taught. So here’s your first real challenge: I want you to come up with your own plan. Right here, right now. Pretend you’re the brand-new head of security and tell me how you’d handle tonight’s event.”

  He tore his gaze from the hotel facade and looked her in the eye.

  “Your answer will be graded.”

  TEN

  Charlie pursed her lips as she circled the block, looking for a place to park. She thought back over the packet she’d been handed. The bare-bones intel she had, and the gulf that was missing, obvious as an ink spill.

  “You want me to come up with a security plan, my first night on the job, with no formal training as a bodyguard.”

  Beckett wore a poker face carved from basalt. “Too tough for you?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Back at HQ,” he said, “you told me you never trusted the lives of your people to spotty intel. Your people. So you were, in fact, entrusted with the lives of soldiers under your direct authority. Am I understanding that correctly?”

  “I was an E-5,” she said. “A sergeant. So . . . yeah. I wasn’t top dog or anything, but I had my responsibilities.”

  “What were you more concerned about? The safety of your people, or making the brass happy?”

  “My people,” Charlie said, no hesitation in her voice. “Making the brass happy wasn’t even an afterthought. Which is probably why I never made E-6, but I wasn’t trying that hard either. Didn’t want to promote myself out of a job.”

  “And here we are. Out in the field, because you knew you needed more intel than I gave you, and you decided to go get it.” Beckett shrugged. “And yet you say you don’t have any training.”

  “That was my gut talking.”

  “Rules and regulations, I can teach. A reliable gut, intuition and instincts, perception, brains—those I can’t. So show me what you’ve got.”

  She pulled into a parking garage a block from the hotel. The side window fought her, gears grinding as it chunked its way down, and she leaned out to pluck a peach-colored ticket from a dispensing machine. The automated security bar lifted up, and she rolled on in.

  Charlie nosed the pickup into an open bay. She killed the ignition. The engine sputtered and died in the concrete gloom.

  “Going off what I’ve already seen,” Charlie said, “renting this place was stupid, a total amateur-hour mistake on Deep Country’s part, and there’s a good chance somebody’s going to get killed tonight. They need to cancel the event. Follow me. I want to show you something.”

  Beckett didn’t say a word as he trailed her up the street. A hot wind ruffled Charlie’s short-cropped hair and blew back the tails of her blazer. She felt beadlets of sweat along her spine turning to ice as she strode toward the hotel’s front entrance. A semicircle drive ran under the overhanging marquee, merging in from Tremont Street on one side and out on the other. Bellhops scurried to load and unload luggage from a short line of cars.

  “For starters,” Charlie said, pointing to the university buildings across the street, “this is a shooting gallery waiting to happen. That’s a college campus. Most likely minimal security, easy to get access to after hours for a determined-enough bad guy, and a shooter could pick their choice of perches. We’ve got zero control of the situation.”

  “So . . . you’re saying we should station a couple of watchers,” Beckett said. His voice was carefully even, noncommittal.

  “Not good enough. Look at this driveway.” Charlie paced the length of the drive, stopping midway down. “Maybe six cars will fit, end to end. Everybody else has their ass hanging out on Tremont while the valets race to keep up. Fine for everyday use, but a major event means a major traffic problem. And that leaves our VIPs sitting stock still in cars along the street for forty-five minutes to an hour, easy. Maybe longer. These are paper pushers who . . . before Deep Country shat the bed on the national news . . . had no reason to worry for their safety, so I’m guessing not even one in twenty of them has bulletproof glass or any kind of vehicle reinforcement. Give me two assassins and a motorcycle—one to drive, one to ride and shoot—and I could wipe out the entire board of directors before they even set foot in the hotel.”

  A couple of midwestern tourists gave her a worried look as they clambered out of their minivan. Charlie didn’t care. Her mind was racing, back in her natural element as she drew mental lines and angles of fire. Back in the sandbox, planning a convoy, measuring every risk she saw and sniffing out the ones she didn’t. Beckett stood like a statue, taking it all in.

  “For that matter,” she said, “let’s talk about the valet parking. They move the vehicles to the garage we just parked in. Did you see any on-site security? I spotted cameras, but no idea if anybody’s watching the feeds. So what’s stopping somebody from getting into that garage and wiring up some explosives with a remote detonator, then blowing them all at once as the VIPs leave the event? Again, total elimination, minimal risk. What’s the point of focusing on protecting the inside of the hotel, when ninety-five percent of the danger is outside? Either we need a security presence in the garage—our people, because I don’t see any reason to trust theirs—or we need another way of handling the traffic situation.”

  Beckett didn’t answer right away. She searched his face like a poker player hunting for a tell, no idea how far off the map she’d wandered. He might as well have been wearing a ski mask, for all the clues his expression gave her.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay?”

  “You just told me all the problems you saw. That’s half the job. Other half’s fixing them. It’s a bad venue, lots of danger spots, but the job is the job, and they aren’t going to cancel the event, so this is the battlefield we have to fight on. Give me a plan.”

  Charlie pursed her lips. She stared at the revolving doors, thinking back to the floor plan in her briefing packet.

  “First off, let’s focus on the client. Jake said that our number one priority is keeping this Sean Ellis guy safe. The rest of his board is priority two. Ellis is the one getting death threats, by name. Now, the other guests, they’re way lower on the totem pole. A motivated assassin is going to want the biggest fish they can catch, right?”

  “Go on.”

  “There’s an employees-only lot around the side of the building,” Charlie said
. “According to the map, it’s isolated by a private alleyway and a security gate. Minimal exposure. It was built to keep the staff’s cars out of sight and give them access to their jobs, not to look pretty, which has the added benefit of making it a hard target for a sniper. We bring Sean and his board in that way and station constant coverage on their vehicles to keep them from being tampered with during the event. That entrance connects to a staff-only stairwell and opens onto the Kennedy Ballroom. We can have the VIPs in place, at the banquet, before a single guest even passes through the lobby.”

  “Still listening,” Beckett said. “And the other guests?”

  Charlie looked up and down the valet drive, then to the revolving doors and the cavernous lobby beyond.

  “Nothing we can do about the traffic jam on the street, but that’s okay. Our big concern here isn’t the safety of the guests; it’s making sure nobody with bad intentions slips through pretending to be a guest. We can make it easier by setting up three queues inside the lobby proper and cordoning it all off—velvet ropes, maybe, like at a nightclub. Three two-person teams checking the list and invitations, six sets of eyes on everybody coming in. We can process them faster that way and be safer at the same time, as opposed to the current plan, which has just two people standing outside the doors and checking all the invitations one at a time.”

  “Huh,” Beckett said. His expression was still a maddening cipher. “Anything else?”

  “One thing. Revel, the in-house restaurant: it’s got a service entrance through the kitchens, and that’s exactly how I’d try to penetrate security if I was a bad guy. We should put somebody in the kitchen just to keep an eye on the door with a staff list, making sure only real employees get in.”

  Beckett rubbed his chin. He scrutinized her, looking her up and down, and nodded.

  “Good catch on that one. I actually missed that in my first write-up, and Jake caught it. Just goes to show, even pros slip up now and again.”