and starts to hum. He studies the diagrams, while Mike unpacks one of the Dell boxes-Styrofoam, a laptop, a bulky antistatic bag, and cables. Carr gives in to the engine racing in his chest, and paces the little room-four paces by three. He walks to the door, puts his hand on the knob, and imagines what would happen if he opened it and walked across a pressure sensor or stepped into a crossfire of infrared beams. No Klaxons or cruisers, Carr knows-Lucovic doesn’t welcome attention, and especially not from the police-but a fast, armed response, the security company guards first, followed closely by Lucovic’s own men.
“Okay,” Bobby says to no one. He’s found what he’s looking for in the thicket of chips, and he folds his diagrams away. Mike powers up the laptop. Bobby opens the antistatic bag and pulls out a large circuit board. He sets the board beside the security system and cables it to the laptop. Carr can see, in the dense mosaic of chips on the board, two large chips with the TEN ARGUS label. Bobby kneels over the laptop and starts typing.
Bobby calls it the Ten Zombie, and he and Dennis built it with specs and components they pinched from a dealer in Sugar Land, whose own offices were scandalously insecure. Zombie because, once connected, it will look to the monitoring units on the other end of the dedicated phone line just like the Ten Argus unit installed in the humid little room at Portrait Capital, though in fact it is a hollowed out version of that system, receiving input from no sensors, and reporting only what Bobby instructs it to report. And Bobby has directed it to murmur incessantly that everything is perfectly fine.
Connecting it-swapping the Zombie for the real thing-is the tricky part: the monitor software makes allowances for power surges and line glitches, and that’s what Bobby wants the swap to look like, but his window is only seven seconds wide. Latin Mike and Bobby stand by the black box, Mike’s hands poised over the phone jacks, Bobby’s over the power lines. Carr holds the laptop and the Zombie board, and keeps his eye on his watch. They’ve practiced this a hundred times or more.
“On three,” Bobby says.
They finish with two seconds to spare, not their best time but close. Bobby checks and rechecks the laptop screen, watching the back-and-forth over the phone lines. He gives a thumbs-up and closes the laptop, and Carr gives up an ancient breath. Mike shakes the tension from his arms and shoulders. Their shirts are dark with sweat.
Bobby and Mike pick up the tools and the boxes, and Carr opens the door. The air in the corridor is ten degrees cooler. He blinks in the light, wipes his eyes, and touches his headset.
“We’re in,” he says.
“Making good time,” Valerie answers.
“Things okay down there?”
“It’s a fucking swamp,” she says.
The office suite is done up in leather and dark wood, someone’s notion of staid and bankerly, as gleaned from watching old TV shows. It reminds Carr of a funeral home. Carr leads the way to Lucovic’s office, skirting the reception area where the video cameras stand watch. They pass a floor safe, a glossy, black monster with a handle like a ship’s wheel, and the name of a long-defunct bank in gold leaf across the front. It’s empty, they know, but Mike gives it an affectionate pat.
Lucovic’s office is locked, but not seriously, and once Carr opens it, Mike and Bobby make space. Lucovic’s leather chair goes to one side of the room, and his mahogany desk goes to the other, which leaves a wide patch of gray carpet in front of the mahogany credenza that stretches across the back wall. There are bookshelves on top of it and file drawers beneath, and behind one set of drawers-the false ones-is the safe.
It’s a Guard-Rite T2100, with steel skin, six thick bolts that anchor it firmly to the floor, and room enough inside to accommodate four bowling balls. Mike spins the combination dial. It’s an Ames and Landrieu R720 lock package, and he’s drilled ten of them in the past two weeks. Today will make eleven. He opens the other Dell box and unpacks his tools.
Carr watches Mike assemble the drill rig, and Bobby lay out the bits and the borescope. He’s pacing again, and Mike doesn’t like it.
“You’re fucking up my rhythm, cabron. How ’bout you do that someplace else?”
Carr walks his fear and boredom into the hall. He studies the door to Lucovic’s office, and the door frame, and the floor, looking for an unseen contact switch, a pressure plate, some other hidden, independent alarm-something Valerie might’ve missed during her two-week stint emptying trash cans with the cleaning crew. He strains to hear heavy footsteps approaching, even as he tells himself that Valerie doesn’t miss those kinds of things.
And then it’s Delcan’s voice he’s hearing again, back in Mexico City, making his pitch at a table by the kitchen. Declan had not hemmed or hawed, but jumped right in.
“I’m a robber, Mr. Carr, a robber plain and simple-cash and highly liquid items only. No art, no stocks, no bonds unless they’re the bearer variety, no finished jewels, no cars or boats or fancy stamp collections. Just cash and its closest cousins.”
Carr squinted, convinced that Declan was drunk and that this was a joke whose reeling logic eluded him. “A bank robber?” he asked eventually. “Teddy said you were a consultant.”
“Not a consultant.” Declan laughed. “And I don’t touch banks. I don’t touch payrolls or cambios either, nor armored cars nor safe deposit boxes-no official money for me. Too much official firepower looking after that stuff, and anyway, who wants to crawl into bed at night with images of sobbing widows in his head, and big-eyed orphans turned out in the cold? Takes the joy from living, don’t it? So it’s black money only I go for. There’s plenty of that lying about, and it leaves you with a nice clean conscience afterward.”
Carr peered at Declan through smoke and his own drunken haze, still waiting for the punch line. “So, you rob from the rich and give to…?”
“Myself, Mr. Carr. And it’s rich shites I rob from-drug runners, gunrunners, whore runners, human smugglers, kidnappers-the very worst swine. I’ve lightened the till on all of them.”
Carr pulled on his beer, but it didn’t help to anchor him. “I can’t imagine they’re very happy about it,” he said finally. “And they’ve got plenty of firepower of their own, and no hesitation using it.”
“That they do.” Declan laughed. “But the upside is they don’t go whining to the polizei either, except maybe to the ones they’ve got on payroll. And when it comes to security, they tend to go for quantity, not quality, if you know what I mean. Heavy stuff, lots of tech sometimes, but not subtle, and typically with some very large blind spots. And, of course, the boys and me are stealthy bastards-they don’t know we exist until we’re over the threshold, and then it’s in fast, out fast, and clear out of town. We don’t leave footprints, and we never-but never- fish the same stream twice.”
“Security in obscurity,” Carr recited-an old lesson that he knew was only sometimes true. “So what’s the downside of your business?”
“What you’d expect: people get cross, they brood over things, they have long memories, and if they catch you they’ll kill you all kinds of dead-by which time death will seem like a mercy. But like I said, we’re dead sneaky: never been pinched; never come close. We’re phantoms, Mr. Carr-black cats tippy-toeing in the black night.”
The smoke that swirled around the room seemed to fill Carr’s head. “I’ve got to have a talk with Teddy Voigt. I don’t know what he’s been telling you about me, but I-”
Declan laughed again. “Teddy said you might be just the ticket.”
“The ticket to what?”
“To bigger and better, Mr. Carr-a step up in the league tables.”
“I’m not following.”
“I’m running a nice enough carnival now. I’ve got a strongman, a fire-eater, a boy who bites the heads off chickens, and I’m the barker that keeps it all going. Our show does fine, Mr. Carr, a reliable money-spinner, but it’s still just a carnival, and I’ve got bigger plans. I want me a full-blown circus, with three feckin’ rings and a fat box office every show. But for that I need a ringmaster: someone to sort out the elephants and monkeys, and stuff the clowns in their wee cars. Someone to make sure the trapeze girl doesn’t land in the lion’s cage, you see? You understand, Mr. Carr, I need a planner, an organizer. Teddy says that’s you.”
Carr’s mind was stuttering, and organization was the last thing on it. He could muster no more than an adolescent shrug, but Declan had momentum enough for both of them.
“Teddy says you’ve got an engineer’s eye for operations-a talent for breaking big problems into bite-size ones, for finding the shortest paths and the points of failure, and coming up with contingencies and fallbacks. He says-”
“Teddy’s talking out of school. He should know better.”
