Meaner Things (16 page)

15.

PROBING MISSIONS

“Good morning, Andy.” I gave the garage entrance security guard my friendliest smile. Over the last few days I’d made a point of exchanging a few words with him every morning and also when I left in the afternoon or evening. ‘Andrew S.’ was the opposite of ‘Jeff D.’. For a start, Andy was a lot older, flabby faced and paunchy, with swarthy skin. I guessed he was of Portuguese or Spanish ethnicity, and this was confirmed the third or fourth time we chatted when he told me that his real first name was ‘Ernesto’.

I never had to say much to get Andy talking. I’d already found out that, while he was technically a member of the security team, for the last seven years he’d done little else than perform the duties of a garage attendant. He spent his working hours in a small, glass-walled cubicle just inside the garage door, the sort of occupation that would have driven me crazy. His responsibilities seemed to be limited to raising the yellow entrance bar for tenants to drive into or out of their parking spaces, and keeping an eye on the video monitors as tenants carded through the doors from the underground garage to the main building itself.

“Morning, Mr. Robie.” Andy always had a big, welcoming grin.

“How are you today, Andy? I had a very interesting dish last night.” I knew Andy liked food and I’d Googled Portuguese dishes.

“Oh yeah, what’s that?”

I gave him my best puzzled look. “It was Portuguese, I think. Bit like lasagne but made with fish. ‘Baklava’ or something.”

Andy gave a big snorting laugh. “You mean bacalhau, boss. Cod pie. I grew up eating it. My mama’s favourite; mine too. She had a million ways to cook it.”

I was doing well here. Andy was associating me positively with his mama. Time to get to the point.

“I’ve been wondering about something Andy. You know how there’s two doors in to the building from the garage?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“Well, the main one is swipe card entry. Is the other one the same?” I knew already that it wasn’t.

Andy shook his head. “Nope, that one’s locked; needs a regular key. But tenants aren’t s‘posed to use it. No video surveillance at that one.”

It was an ‘aha’ moment.
No
video
surveillance
at
that
one
. I tried to look enlightened and bored at the same time.

“Ah, that explains it. I’ll use the main door then, of course. Thanks Andy.”

“No problem boss.”

I eased my car past the glass cubicle and parked in stall 1207. Using Emma’s cash and another false identity created by Charlie, I’d checked the small ads in the
Province
and bought the most inconspicuous car I could find, a four-year-old Toyota Corolla in the very common light brown colour the dealers call ‘Desert Sand’. Reliable, boring and popular – there must be thousands of similar Corollas in the Metro Vancouver area – it would attract zero attention.

I swiped into the building, ignoring the other door with the normal lock, in case Andy was watching me. Inside, a short corridor, cluttered with big green garbage bags and flattened cardboard boxes stacked against the wall, led to another door that opened into the plush hallway near the elevators.

My mind was buzzing with possibilities. Tenants had to use the swipe card door to enter the building from the garage, which meant leaving an electronic record of one’s comings and goings, just like one did at the front entrance. In addition, there were video cameras along the corridor and in the elevator hallway that recorded one’s movements visually. But . . . if Charlie could fabricate a key to the
other
door from the garage into the building, our entrance would leave no electronic trail. Neither would there be any video footage of the area from the locked door to the hallway door.

It was another piece to the puzzle and I could see it fitting perfectly.

*

I checked my watch for the twentieth time and saw that it was coming up to seven p.m., closing time. The hardest part of this heist was turning out to be the long, tedious hours I had to spend sitting around in the office on the twelfth floor, with nothing much to do except make notes and snooze uncomfortably over the desk. I told myself that if I ever did this again, I’d rent a room with a decent view.

I was working on interacting with all the security guards or at least all the ones available in public areas, which was surprisingly few. I had no access to one of the guards in the security control room: a big, muscle-bound, black-bearded animal with ‘Axel A.’ on his name badge, but whom I’d once heard Jeff D. call ‘Razor’. His job was to monitor all the hallways and corridors and to buzz open the fenced day gate to the vault when tenants wanted access to their safe deposit boxes. From the look of him, he probably spent the rest of his time in the gym.

The second of the two guards in the video room, ‘Jeff D.’, was more accessible. He emerged at least twice a day to unlock and lock the vault. Two other guards in the building did have everyday contact with tenants and the public: Andy at the garage entrance and the guard at the main entrance, the one who had accosted me when I’d been filming too obviously.

This guard was called ‘Roger G.’, who spent most of his day in the security booth near the front door. He too had video monitors, allowing him to watch the foot traffic coming in and out during business hours. His other duties included checking visitors’ IDs and issuing temporary day passes, and phoning tenants on the upstairs floors to confirm that strangers had legitimate appointments. Middle-aged, naturally surly, truculent when I did manage to get a few words out of him, he was proving a hard nut to crack. Tonight I was going to have one more go at him.

I exited the elevator on the main floor and took my time about leaving, sauntering slowly towards the door, my eyes and ears attuned to everything going on around me. I soaked up the information coming at me, processed it rapidly, and filed it away for later. As I passed the security control room I looked in and saw the two guards, Jeff D. and his ape-like colleague, switching off their video monitors for the night. In my hand I held a small notebook like a date planner, a slim little thing that wouldn’t make much noise when I pretended to drop it on the floor. I let it drop from my hand and ‘accidently’ kicked it closer to the security room.

I stooped and picked it up, taking a good long look through the security room window, both on the way down and the way back up.

I was thrilled by what I saw. Jeff D. was swapping fresh cassette tapes for the full ones in the recording system. A VCR would be much easier and quicker to access than a computer’s hard drive.

I stuffed the notebook into my pocket and approached the front entrance turnstile.

“Busy day, Roger?” I asked hopefully as I reached him.

There was the briefest of grunts in reply.

“Do they ever let you out of there?” I ventured. I’d tried to engage him in conversation half-a-dozen times already and nothing had worked. This time he looked up and peered at me over the top rim of his glasses. A narrow frown creased his forehead.

“Not a lot, sir.” For Roger this was positively verbose.

“You should switch with Jeff D. once in a while,” I suggested. “He gets to stretch his legs up and down to the vault.”

“Never been down there.” That was all I got in reply before his head went down again.

I pushed through the plate glass doors and lingered outside the building, checking my watch as if waiting to be picked up. It was a couple of minutes past seven o’clock. Using my side vision as much as possible, I watched as Roger G. opened one of the glass doors. He reached up and yanked down a rolling, garage-style door. It slammed into the ground with a crashing thud, followed by the distinct ratcheting sound of a lock being engaged. I assumed that the glass doors behind it were then locked too.

I’d observed this closing ritual several times now and was sure it must be standard operating procedure.

I walked to the coffee shop at the end of the block, well satisfied with my evening’s work. Inside, I sat at the window with a café Americano and an overpriced, lukewarm wrap, and considered what I had learned so far about security at the building.

Overall, I was pretty pleased. Once again, just like ten years ago, I had the advantage that this was an older building. The picture taking shape in my mind was of a technology far from cutting edge, and security procedures that hadn’t changed in a long time. The guards evidently relied heavily on video monitoring – using dated videotape technology – for security. Roger had never even been down to the vault room and Andy probably hadn’t either. Based on the  demeanour and habits of the guards, they seemed to have grown dangerously complacent over the years, none of them seriously expecting any attempt to be made on robbing the vault. On the contrary, they trusted the vault’s impressive built-in security features implicitly and were content to stare at monitor screens all day while sipping lukewarm coffee from Styrofoam cups.

This was all to the good as far as I was concerned.

Already I was pretty sure that getting into the building to do the heist would not be particularly difficult. That still left the vault door to be overcome, with its heavy slabs of steel, long key and four-number code with a hundred million possible combinations. Somehow, I had to figure a way past that.

*

I finished up my cardboard wrap and walked back to the building. Tenants were allowed to stay behind and work in their offices later than seven p.m. – they just didn’t have any access to the vault until seven a.m. the next morning, or Monday morning if it was a weekend. The way out after hours was through a door beside the elevators into the back corridor to the garage exit, after which one drove out through the garage gate, using a key that raised the yellow bar and activated the gated exit.

Of course, the way out after hours could become a way in after hours.

I’d already noted with satisfaction that the garage doors at the side of the building faced a quieter street than the main entrance. This was especially true in the evenings when this part of downtown grew quiet. It would be even more so at, say, midnight or one a.m. when I planned to perform the heist.

I strolled past the garage doors and gave them another close examination. There was no way in from the outside – one was supposed to telephone the night security guard if one wanted inside again. That would not suit me at all. Nor could I stay late in the building the night of the heist. My swipe card would show that I had not left during business hours and that would make me an immediate suspect. I wanted as much time as possible to disappear, so that ‘John Robie’ could simply melt away and never be seen or heard of again.

*

“Beat this Jeff D. guy over the head and make him open the vault,” Charlie said. We were sitting in his garden, sipping Charlie’s non-alcoholic lager, and enjoying the evening sun setting behind the hideous coat-hanger robot and the cow with antlers.

“Nothing doing,” I replied. “Remember, we agreed: no violence.”

“Huh, so you say, but it’s the way most places get robbed.”

“Sure, stickups are one way. Go roaring in with guns blazing, terrorize the guards, hold a gun to Jeff’s head until he gives us the combination. Can you build us a helicopter for our rooftop getaway?”

“OK, I get the point. But what’s the alternative?”

“Finesse, my man, finesse. We tiptoe in, like phantoms in the night, unheard, unseen, empty Zheng’s boxes and be long gone before anyone even knows we’ve been there.”

Charlie snorted. “Sounds lovely. Picnic at Zheng Vault. I’ll bring the cucumber sandwiches. How exactly do we do it?”

“I don’t know yet, but I’m getting closer every day.” I put my glass down with a thud that got his attention. “Anyway, I’m serious about no violence, Charlie. Sticking guns in people’s faces makes us into thugs, lowlifes. We’re doing this to bring Zheng down, not just to make us rich.”

“Fine. All I’m saying is kidnapping a guard, or better still a guard’s wife, is the traditional way to do it.”

“It’s also the traditional way for a hostage to escape, or get hurt trying to, or for one of us to get hurt, not to mention the twenty years to life sentences if something goes wrong.”

Charlie grunted noncommittally.

“And it wouldn’t work anyway. Don’t forget the magnetic door alarm is on a timer. If we got a guard to open the vault after hours, it would set off the alarm.”

“True enough.”

“No, we won’t be taking any unforeseen risks,” I continued. “I’ll plan it down to the smallest detail. Stealth is the only acceptable route, not violence. And when we do it, we do it with élan.”

My little speech over, I took another mouthful of warm beer.

“I’ve never done a job as big as this one,” Charlie said.

“Neither have I,” I said, “And this will be my last.”

“What do you think we’ll find in Zheng’s boxes?”

I thought for a moment. “Don’t know. Diamonds, obviously. You have connections who can handle those. That’s the monetary end of the heist. I’m hoping there will also be all kinds of incriminating stuff.”

“Such as?”