“Mr. Dean, you wanted to speak with me?”
“The incident in front of the restaurant where the UN monitors were gathering seems to have been a setup. Lia saw two men who were not policemen come out of a building and fire into the crowd. A short while later, there was a television interview with a victim who lied.”
Rubens listened impassively, not even muttering a “yes.” Dean couldn’t tell if he was interested, uninterested, or even still on the line. Maybe it was just the nature of the communications system they were using, but Dean felt like he was talking to a machine. He expected
Was this just Rubens being Rubens? Or was it a subtle way of telling a field op that his job was to simply follow orders and not analyze what was going on around him?
“I don’t know who was behind the riot,” added Dean. “Lia wasn’t sure, either. Someone trying to make the police look bad.”
“Very well. Anything else?” asked Rubens.
“That’s it.”
“Please do your best.”
The line went clear.
29
Since Dean and Karr were going into the bank, Lia handled the task of doping the guards’ dinner by herself. Dean and Karr had already scoped out the arrangement: a waiter at a restaurant across the street took the plates and some bottled water and carried them over to the bank at eleven. The tray was prepared at the waiters’ station between the kitchen and the dining area in a hall that connected to another hall with the restrooms.
Two bottles with a heavy dose of a barbiturate ordinarily used to sedate patients for operations had been prepared; Lia carried them under her long skirt, strapped to her calves.
Her first task after getting a table in the restaurant was to plant a video bug near the waiters’ station; since it was out of view from the dining room the Art Room would have to tell her when to make the switch. But when she went to plant the bug, she found the corridor filled with waiters; they were gabbing about a soccer game, milling around making it impossible to simply sneak over and put the bug in one of the light fixtures as she’d planned. And she couldn’t just mount it on the baseboard, either; the shelf of the waiters’ station blocked the view.
One of the waiters noticed Lia as she eyed the corridor, looking for a solution. He asked if he could help her, and she said that she was looking for a job.
She could tell instantly from his expression that was the wrong thing to say. Not only was she too well dressed to be a service worker, but she was female — all of the servers here were men.
Lia froze for half a second before plunging into a more believable story — she was a chef in training who hoped to gain experience overseas. As the words rushed out of her mouth she began to feel more comfortable. The waiter’s face brightened and he insisted she come with him to the kitchen and meet the chef. Lia followed him around the divider into a small area of controlled chaos, where four rather large men threw pans and pots around, jabbering in a kind of kitchen patois about the food they were preparing.
Lia spotted a shelf that had a view of the window over the waiters’ station; she moved next to it, scratched her hair, and in a smooth, well-practiced motion, planted the video bug.
“Good. We have a full view,” said Rockman.
But now she was trapped by her own cover story. The chef had interned at a number of restaurants in Europe and the U.S. and apparently saw an opportunity to pay back the kindness of others — and not coincidentally gain some free labor and an attractive protege. With great enthusiasm, he began telling Lia his philosophy of food preparation as well as his methods, giving a running commentary on what he was doing that would have put many a TV chef to shame.
He had just started to hold forth on the importance of fresh herbs when one of his assistants plucked some chicken out of a pile, spooned up some rice, and set out two plates for the waiter to finish and take over.
“Have to go,” Lia told her would-be benefactor. “Ladies’ room.”
It was an effective if overused excuse, and she escaped back into the hallway just in time to see the waiter who had introduced her earlier take the tray from the station and start toward the back door.
Lia followed, waiting until he was at the threshold to call to him.
“There you are,” she said. “I wanted to thank you. You’re very kind.”
The man looked at her with the puzzled expression he’d had earlier. Once again Lia felt herself freeze, her brain refusing to move ahead smoothly.
She got over it by touching the man’s shoulder, feigning something more than casual interest as she thanked him again. The look of desire in his eyes as he glanced down revolted her, even as she realized it meant that she would succeed. She reached up to kiss him — and as she did, knocked the tray to the floor. The contents went flying, the plastic water bottles rolling down the hall.
“I’m sorry; I’m sorry,” she said, grabbing them.
Exasperated, the waiter left the bottles where they had fallen and went into the nearby kitchen for replacements. Lia switched the bottles, holding the replacements out to the waiter when he returned.
“I’m sorry,” she told the waiter.
He forced a smile and this time kept his leers to himself as he walked out the back.
30
Dean heard Rockman grumbling in the background as he climbed in through the second-story window of the bank.
“They’re just taking forever with that food,” said Rockman, referring to the guards outside the bank, who had to check the tray and bring it inside to the other guards. “The last two nights they went right in. Now they have to taste it? What gives?”
Dean smiled to himself. The runner — and the rest of the Art Room — tended to get testy when events didn’t precisely match their preconceived script.
Karr waved at him from the inside doorway, pointing to an infrared beam of light running across the threshold. The light was easily visible with their glasses; they’d decided to let the system alone, since it could be easily avoided.
Dean turned back to the window, lowering it carefully so that he didn’t jostle the device Karr had used to defeat the alarm. Then he placed a satellite transmitter on the sill, making sure it was oriented toward the clear sky. The transmitter — it had been designed to look like a small personal satellite FM radio receiver — would pick up signals from the booster they would place downstairs, allowing the Art Room to communicate directly with them if they were both in the vault. In the event they had to leave it behind for some reason, the Art Room could send a signal to fry its circuitry, and they’d pick it up the next day.
“Transmitter’s good here,” Rockman told him.
“Good,” said Dean. He checked the replacement envelopes in his backpack before cinching it back up, then moved across the room.
“Finally,” said Rockman. “They’re bringing the food inside.”
Karr was waiting for Dean by the stairwell, once again pointing out the beam of ordinarily invisible light. Once Dean acknowledged it, the other op tapped his watch. They had agreed before going in that if the guards weren’t sleeping by 11:40, they would use the blowpipe. They had ten minutes to go.
Dean took the weapon from his belt and loaded it. About the size of a .22-caliber air gun, the blowpipe had a highly accurate scope integrated into the housing; the weapon had no kick and could be held at just about any angle without harming its accuracy.
“Guard One is drinking,” said Rockman, watching them through the bank’s own video system. As soon as the
