“Yes.”
“Three steps,” he said.
“I understand.”
“The most important of which-”
“Is turning around and hiding,” she interrupted. “I got that.”
“The black raincoat,” he said. “Turn around once you’re in there.”
“Small steps.”
“Exactly.”
“I’ve got it,” she said.
“Scared?”
“You bet.”
“That’s good.”
“How can you say that?”
“There will be a diversion once you’re out. You get to that door-”
“She told me.”
“A plainclothes will be waiting for you on the other side.”
“I wish I were there now.”
“We can call this off,” he said, his expectant voice clearly preferring this choice.
“No. I want you to catch him. I want this over.” They had discussed this. Once the money was delivered, Hayes was guilty of extortion. At that point they had the pressure to negotiate a deal to get Liz out of the middle and Hayes to cooperate. If all went well, a matter of hours and she and Lou could begin the process of rebuilding.
“Time’s up,” he said.
“Everyone keeps saying that.”
“At any given moment, there’s one of us within three or four steps of you.”
“It’s her I’m worried about… this Malone girl. What if he harms her? How am I supposed to live with that?”
“No matter what, you stay inside the bank. Gaynes explained that?”
“Time’s up,” she said, impatient now to have it over with. She added, “She explained it, Lou. Twice. I’ve got it.”
“Be safe,” he said.
He hung up before she had the chance to tell him that she loved him. Maybe he’d sensed it coming, she thought. Maybe he couldn’t handle that right now.
The building’s lobby contained WestCorp’s flagship branch. It looked like a downtown men’s club with teller windows elaborately decorated in dark wood paneling, reproduction partner desks, green banker desktop lights, brass and smoked glass chandeliers, and a rich green carpet with borders of twisting gold braids. The phones purred, they did not ring. Voices traveled only a few feet.
Wearing her black, full-length raincoat and carrying the aluminum briefcase she’d purchased in the WestCorp Center’s small mall only minutes before, Liz entered the branch office as nervous as on her wedding day, keenly aware of the elaborate charade and her role as a participant. To anyone else, the bank’s main floor appeared no different than on any other business day, but to her the abundance of familiar faces made this seem more like the staging of a Christmas play. She immediately identified no fewer than five familiar faces from Crimes Against Persons: two behind desks, posing as bank officers; one up a ladder affixing to the wall a bright orange banner offering low-interest car loans; two others just behind the bank tellers, pretending to be busy with paperwork. Seeing their faces calmed her.
She approached the teller line, cordoned off by stainless steel stands and retractable belts. She hesitated a little too long at the small sign atop the stanchion. “Next?” A young Asian guy in his twenties standing in the third window over. Liz felt a jolt of panic. “I can help you,” the young man encouraged. In all, it took her a little under five minutes to get the cash, withdrawn from their home equity line. She tried not to be bothered by the feeling of a dozen eyes boring into her. Behind her, a maintenance man moved aside two orange cones from in front of the revolving doors, removing the CLOSED FOR REPAIR sign. She identified him as Detective Frank McNamara.
The pounding of her heart, the dry mouth, the stinging eyes accounted for the panic she fought to control, along with the rhythmic surge of blood in her ears and the coarse sound of her breathing. She stepped inside the revolving door, hoisting the briefcase and pushing on the bar with both hands. The lumbering carousel began to spin, the glass tinted ahead of her, its surface mirrored behind-a new feature. This had been McNamara’s handiwork. The Mylar-mirrored glass would hide her.
She recalled Lou’s instructions vividly: Clutch the briefcase to her chest, turn toward the center of the revolving door, and compress herself, taking tiny footsteps, careful not to jam the door’s motion.
No one had warned her how confined this space would feel, how it would shrink around her, removing all the air. Two steps into it, she sagged, and thought she might pass out.
As a Crimes Against Persons lieutenant, Boldt’s participation in this, or any Special Ops surveillance, even one involving his wife, was strictly in an advisory role. Boldt was ready for undercover street work if necessary, dressed in blue jeans, a black sweatshirt advertising a Paris jazz club, and a British driving cap pulled down low on his brow. The disguise was finished off with a pair of black-framed fashion glasses. He looked nerdy by design-a forty-year-old loner who sat on park benches feeding the pigeons.
In the front of his thoughts lay the possibility that the money drop was nothing more than a clever cover for the opportunity to abduct his wife. Never mind the Special Ops switch-Malone for Liz-Boldt was not going to have any abduction on his conscience.
Pahwan Riz, a thirty-five-year-old Malaysian American whose mother was a full-blooded Englishwoman, had skin the color of a leather couch, mercurial green eyes that squinted naturally in a constant suspicion, and a lilting, singsong voice that belied his intensity. Riz commanded this special operation, and ran his unit like a military man. Under normal circumstances Boldt celebrated Riz’s formalities, admired a man who had fought racial prejudice in order to reach the coveted position of commander of a twenty-five-person team that was regularly at high risk. S.O. offered officers the likelihood of live ammunition combat and, as such, drew its water from a dark well. Because it was made up of those willing, even eager, to put themselves into the line of fire, S.O.’s direction of the operation came as a mixed blessing.
Boldt occupied the cracked vinyl passenger seat of a former steam-cleaning van confiscated years before in a drug bust. It served as the communications command vehicle, mobile headquarters for Riz and his black-clad squad of commandos.
With the van parked on the third level of a parking garage across the street from the bank, both Boldt and the wheel man, a guy named Travis, brandished binoculars, trained onto the bank building’s exterior. Behind them, on the other side of a black curtain, where a bank of television monitors flickered in the dim light, came the sputtering and spitting sound of radio traffic orchestrated by a dull-voiced, unexcitable woman dispatcher who sat next to Riz.
“Reece!” Boldt called out using the universally accepted but incorrect pronunciation of the commander’s last name as the bank’s revolving door moved for the first time.
“We saw it,” Riz confirmed.
The revolving door spun like a giant paddle wheel. Riz called out commands and the dispatcher repeated them. A big guy on the sidewalk sucked on a cigarette and turned toward the revolving doors just as a woman wearing a black raincoat and carrying an aluminum briefcase stepped out from those doors and into pedestrian traffic. Even knowing what to look for, Boldt missed the switch, never saw his wife’s black raincoat tucked into the apex of that spinning wedge of the revolving doors.
“Phase two,” Riz said calmly.
A woman dressed as Liz Boldt, looking like Liz Boldt, and carrying an aluminum briefcase like the one Liz Boldt was supposed to be carrying, headed down the sidewalk as instructed. Boldt hoisted the binoculars. Even under magnification Malone passed for Liz.
Boldt popped open his door and said, “I’m on channel one-six, and I’ve got my cell. Keep me in the loop.”
