He didn’t deny it. He was always like that — upbeat, optimistic, bucking up the troops.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
We rolled into New York through the Lincoln Tunnel. With Sarah Houston, Willie Varner, and Joe Billy Dunn in the van, it had been a hell of a trip. Willie sat in the back telling Tommy Carmellini stories while he sipped beer. Houston was in the passenger seat beside me. She didn’t have much to say while Willie ran his mouth, but from time to time she gave me an appraising glance.
Most of Willie’s tales were lies — for reasons too obvious to mention, I had long ago learned that the less said to people about my business the better. Didn’t matter to Willie. He told what he knew, what he suspected, and downright bald-faced lies, all with the same air of omniscient authority. To hear him tell it I was the worst desperado since Willie Sutton. There wasn’t a safe made that I couldn’t crack, a wall I couldn’t climb, a man alive I couldn’t con.
Joe Billy egged him on, all the way across Delaware and New Bfsey. Approaching New York 1 turned on the radio, found a jazz ation, and cranked the volume up. Even then I could hear Willie talking loudly to Dunn, telling him whatever lies popped into his crooked head.
The tunnel was a relief. I snapped the radio off and told the guys in back to shut up. Amazingly, they did. Wanted to see New York, I guess.
The streets and avenues were packed, as usual. What all these millions of people do to make a living is one of the unsolved mysteries of the modern age, but make a living they do. There they were, scurrying along the sidewalks and crosswalks like a horde of ants or a biblical plague of locusts while trucks, taxis, and limos jammed the streets, honking, creeping, oozing along like thick mud flowing down a storm drain.
We circled the New York Hilton once, looking for Secret Service agents and vehicles. True, the president wasn’t supposed to stay at this hotel, and the convention was being held at the Javits Center, but they just might be in there today anyway, which would complicate our lives. Didn’t see anything or anyone out of the ordinary, though.
We dropped Sarah at the corner near the front of the joint. She could do her thing anyplace that had a telephone line, but the Hilton had a high-speed cable Internet connection, so why not?
She marched away in her high heels and New York business suit, her laptop case dangling from a strap over her shoulder, pulling her overnight bag on its little wheels. With her head erect and hair stirring in the breeze, I had to admit, she was a fine-looking hunk of woman. Little twisted upstairs, but I didn’t regard that as a disqualifying disability, not in this day and age. And who was I to talk?
What I found fascinating was the way her hips swayed with—
The guy behind me beeped; the light had changed. Joe Billy— now in the passenger seat — gave him the finger, and we circled the block again. In that traffic, each circuit took about twelve minutes.
We were halfway into the next one when my cell phone rang. “I’m in,” she said. That meant she had checked into her room and been shown upstairs. She was now on-line and had hacked into the Hilton’s central computer. That wasn’t as big a feat as you might imagine, since she had explored the security firewalls at her leisure at her office at the NSA facility at Fort Meade. Indeed, yesterday she had twice crashed the hotel’s video security system for ten seconds at a time. “And it’s down.” Down again, she meant, and couldn’t be resurrected until she fixed it.
“Okay.” I hung up, put the phone in my shirt pocket.
Actually, circling the hotel was sort of dumb. I headed up the avenue toward Central Park. We were rolling through the park when the telephone rang again.
“They’ve called a service company. I’ve just called the company back and canceled the call. Give them about a half hour before you arrive.”
“Okay.”
I returned the telephone to my pocket and told the guys, “We’re a go.”
Exactly thirty-two minutes later we rolled into the hotel’s service entrance and parked beside two trucks off- loading supplies — one food, one liquor. At the control console in back, Willie began the final check on our bugs. Joe Billy and I grabbed our tools and got out, locking the van behind us.
“Security service company,” I told the guard. “We got an urgent call a little while ago and zipped on over.”
“Wow! That was fast. They just had me put you guys on the list fifteen minutes ago.”
“We were on a job just down the street. This shouldn’t take long. Service is our business.” That motto was embroidered on shirts, just below the company name. I had gotten the shirts yesterday at a custom shirt shop in suburban Washington.
“I’ve heard that shit before,” the guard said wearily as he passed us the clipboard to sign our names on. I signed as Andy Jackson Jr., and Joe Billy signed as Henry Clay. The guard glanced at the board, handed us visitors’ passes to clip to our shirt pockets, and gave us directions to the security center.
It was in a windowless room deep within the bowels of the hotel. The two uniformed guards on duty were pleased to see us, especially the woman, who looked Joe Billy over with interest. She was short and dumpy and talked with a Brooklyn accent as she explained how the video feeds had crapped out all at once. Computer still seemed to be working properly, though.
He nodded sagely and began checking the cables leading to the machines and the connections. I scrutinized the bank of monitors, checked all the connections, made sure everything was getting power. This was all for show, of course. It helped that Joe Billy had actually taken a course in video security systems — completed it just a week ago, as a matter of fact. He tossed off enough phrases to convince the guards that we were indeed knowledgeable, if they had any doubts.
He played with the computer while the guards and I watched. Shut it down, rebooted it, the whole drill. The female guard got as close to him as she dared. Finally he said, “It’s gotta be a problem in the camera circuit. Will you check, Junior?” I was Junior. The embroidered name on my shirt said so.
On my way out of the room I whispered to the girl, “He’s single.” I went back to the truck for a bag full of bugs.
“They’re ready to go,” Willie said. “How’s everything going?”
“Piece of cake.” Indeed, the job was routine. I bugged four hotels in Europe earlier that spring using just this method, although with different personnel.
“By the way,” I added, “I didn’t appreciate you making me the topic of conversation all the way up from Washington.”
“Sarah likes you. She sopped up ever’ word.”
“Don’t blow smoke. You were talking to Dunn. The other day I stuck a pistol in his face and threatened to shoot it off. All those lies you told will make him think I’m some kinda criminal.”
“You worry too much about what other people think. The people who know you like I do are damn glad to have you around.”
“Do me a favor, Willy. Don’t talk about me to anybody.”
“Even Sarah?”
“She doesn’t like me either.”
“Like hell! She was all ears. Sometimes, boy, I think you’re dumber than a box of rocks.”
I made a rude noise, hoisted the bag of bugs, and locked the vehicle door behind me. Yeah, right. Sarah Houston — the woman who once told me I was a farm animal.
Keeping your mouth shut is a lost art. I used to think Willy knew how to do it. His injuries had affected his brain. Wouldn’t surprise me if he announced he was marrying his hospital nurse.
I started at the security office and began checking security cameras. They were all fine, of course, but I set up a stepladder, climbed it, and gave the installation the once-over, checking the voltage in, the coaxial cable, and so forth. Two minutes sufficed for each camera. All these cameras sent their video by coaxial cable to the security center. The new units being installed in many commercial buildings broadcast the video, which made the problem of tapping them ridiculously simple. One merely moved a receiver within range and tuned in. To tap a hardwired video
