Ruthless (3 page)

“Yep,” Eric said breezily, staring at that last segment of wall between them and the big score. “I hit ’em with a big ass quake over on Wall Street, like 5.5 on the ol’ Richter scale, then dropped a smaller one, maybe a 4.2 at the corner of Nassau and Liberty for about ten seconds.” He stretched, flexing his arms as he interlaced his fingers above his head. “They are primed, baby. Let’s do this.”

Keith nodded once, then turned his head toward the drill panel. He was on his job, which left Eric to watch, running a hand through his long, blond hair. Six months of planning for this. That’s what it had taken. Little scores to bankroll things, some bank jobs out of state and in Jersey, enough to fund the drill and the escape route.

And Eric had spent the last six months walking every street in Manhattan and riding the subways constantly, dropping quakes on the entire island. He’d even done a couple in Brooklyn and Queens for coverage. It was a treat, watching people scream and run as the ground started shaking. It wasn’t something New Yorkers were used to, after all. Except maybe the ones who came from L.A.

“How long do you need?” Eric asked as the drill throttled up. It wasn’t too loud, but it was still a four-foot-across circular drill designed to cut through concrete and rock. The diamond tips hadn’t been cheap, either. That had been a whole score from a bank in Yonkers, just to pay for the bits.

“If your girlfriend’s right—” Keith started.

“Cassidy is always right,” Eric said, good humor gone in a second. He brought back the smile when he noticed Keith almost flinch back. “The sooner you realize that, the smoother your life is gonna go, my friend.”

“Yeah, well,” Keith said, voice sounding a little hollow, “she told me it’ll only take a couple minutes on this last foot, so …”

“So a couple minutes it is,” Eric said, settling back to watch. “Crew’s ready?”

“They’ve been ready for months,” Keith said, and the drill revved up as he cranked it forward. The ground started to shake, just a little, nothing like what Eric had just laid down up on the surface. This was a little bitty shake, maybe 1.2 on the scale. Eric knew the Richter scale. Knew it like the back of his hand. He’d been raised in L.A., and some things you just absorb in quake country.

“Settle back and we’ll be through in a minute!” Keith called to him over the low, muffled rumbling of the drill.

Eric leaned against a dusty wall. The moment was coming. Here they were, eighty feet below Liberty Street in lower Manhattan, six months of planning to lead to this moment. It was gonna be a triumph, the cap on this whole frigging brilliant op. He thought of Cassidy, of how she’d planned this whole thing, and he pulled out his cell phone. One bar of signal, which was probably due to the repeater they’d installed in the basement where the tunnel started. They’d needed communication, after all.

Almost through, babe
, he typed into the text message.
See you soon
, he finished and hit send.

Then he settled back to watch Keith Bailey dig the final foot into the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, daydreaming about the $200 billion dollars in gold that he’d be laying his hands on in less than a minute’s time.

“‘Almost through, babe,’” Felix Rocha read aloud in the back of an NYPD panel truck, “‘See you soon.’”

“Oh, Mr. Rocha,” I said, deadpan, turning his heavily-gelled head around to look at me quizzically, “restrain your romantic side. You can see me right now.”

“It’s the text message,” he said with utter disgust. “Originates from Eric Simmons’s phone.”

“Suuuuuure,” I say, taunting him. I was probably creating a hostile environment, but Rocha did it everywhere he went. The man had the personality of a particularly corrosive acid, so I didn’t mind having a little fun with him.

“How the hell did you pull his text message in real time?” asked the NYPD Lieutenant, Allyn Welch, who was sitting to my left.

“This piece of equipment is called a VME Dominator,” I said. “It does cool things like that.”

“That’s classified,” Rocha said with great annoyance. Rocha worked for the NSA, with us, and without a hint of politeness, patience or nicety.

I exchanged a look with Welch, who was viewing Rocha with great suspicion—as one might do when someone’s being an ass to you. “He can also make it turn on the microphone to listen in on their conversation, but he’s being coy about it because you’re in the truck.” I glanced over at Rocha, and saw his jaw lock tightly, his already puckered lips pressing even closer together. I have that effect on people sometimes.

The back door of the truck opened and closed as a tall guy stepped inside, shivering and shaking his dark coat to drop a few flakes of snow off the shoulder. “It’s not exactly Minnesota,” Reed said as he entered, “but it’s pretty cold out there. Nice wind whipping between the buildings, kinda feels like the prairie.”

“Maybe you can use it to float between the buildings like Mary Poppins,” I suggested, shooting my brother a smile, which he returned.

“More like Spider-Man,” he fired back. “And maybe I will.”

“I’m still back on this cell phone thing,” Lt. Welch said, running a hand over his thinly combed-over hair. Poor guy was having trouble letting it go with dignity. “So you can use a suspect’s own phone against them as a bug?”

“Yep,” I said before Rocha could spew the words “IT’S CLASSIFIED!” into the air like an ant bomb. Which he probably needed to do desperately, since he had a bug up his ass the size of a New York taxi.

“How does it work?” Welch asked.

“By violating all your rights to privacy in less time than it takes you to say—” Reed started.

“It mimics a cell phone tower and routes your calls, text and data through it,” I said, and then shot an annoyed look at my brother. “And will you lay off already? We’re using it to monitor someone who’s drilling a tunnel into the biggest gold depository in the world; it’s not like we’re listening in on Grandma’s innocent conversation with her babies or some kinky convo held between a bondage queen and her biggest client.” I stared him down for a second, and my confidence wavered. I looked over at Rocha. “Uhm … how many cell phones are we intercepting right now, just out of curiosity?”

Rocha sent me a look of pure loathing. “That’s classified,” he said petulantly.

“Your hairstyle is classified, too, isn’t?” I asked. “The amount of gel you use on a daily basis? Number of toilet paper squares consumed per wipe?” He got a look that told me he was pissed and turned back to his screen. I turned to look at Lt. Welch. “As you can tell, we are a highly professional organization.”

Welch nodded sympathetically. “We all have our assholes to deal with.”

“Hey!” Rocha said, more than a little annoyed.

“I don’t even want to know how many squares per wipe it’d take to clean you up,” I said. Rocha just grunted, giving up the fight, and turned back to his console without another word. “So, they’re about to break through.”

“Should we go?” Welch asked me.

I glanced at Reed. “Sure, why not?” I nodded toward the back of the van. My brother opened it and held the door for me as I popped out onto the New York street.

Flakes gently fell from the sky as I stood in the middle of a rush hour the like of which I’d never experienced. People were surging up both sides of the sidewalk in mighty throngs. Reed had told me about this place, about the energy of the crowds, how it’s almost a living thing. I stood there on the sidewalk just feeling claustrophobic and wishing for the wide, sprawling view from my office. It looked out over lovely snow-covered fields at the moment, and now that we ran a much smaller organization than when I started on the campus, it was rare that I saw anyone outside my window.

Solitude, thy name is bliss.

I stood on that street, and there was no bliss to be found. A steady line of cars inched by, passing the panel truck at about two miles per hour, with frequent stops as the traffic lights changed. There were a lot of honks, I noticed, more than I thought was reasonable. Of course, I think more than one honk at a time is kind of unreasonable. Either the person knows they’re being an ass or they don’t, and no matter how many times you honk at an asshole—like Rocha—he’s not going to stop being an asshole.

That might just be my life’s philosophy: people don’t change.

“Come on,” Reed said to me, jarring me as he slammed the van door shut. Welch strode ahead of us, right into traffic without a care in the world. I blanched on his behalf and then remembered that a taxicab traveling at two miles per hour couldn’t really hurt me. Maybe him, but not me, and I started forward to follow. A cavalcade of horns followed me, and I flipped a bird at the guy, unveiling my inner New Yorker, I suppose.

“Acclimating to the town, I see,” Reed said, the perpetual smartass.

“When in Rome,” I said, “break everything possible and try and get yourself kicked off the continent.” I snapped him a grin. “Oh, wait, that’s you.”

“You get banned by one massive continental parliamentary government and nobody ever lets you forget it,” Reed grumbled.

“Yeah, it’s kinda like you and this constant bitching about a surveillance state,” I said. “Just submit your emails and your rectum to probing or throw away your cell phone, live like a Luddite and stop griping, will you?”

“Har har,” Reed said as we crossed the street, following Lt. Welch into the massive entrance of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “You laugh now, but—”

“Just stop,” I said, shaking my head. “Put your game face on.”

“I’ve always wondered what a game face looks like,” Reed mused. “You know, not being a sports fan.”

“Probably not like an O face,” I said, deploying something I’d been saving for a special occasion, “though I suppose we’d have to ask Dr. Perugini if the two are similar in your case.”

The shocked expression was worth it. “How did you know?” he asked.

“That you’ve been getting far more regular check-ups than our insurance pays for?” I smirked. “It’s been, like, years. Does she make you turn your head and cough every time, or—”

“Later,” he said, and I knew that was a promise he wasn’t going to keep. Not that I really wanted to hear about it, or I would have dropped the fact that I knew a lot earlier.

We breezed into a massive lobby, all marble and granite, opulence and wealth. You could tell the place was money just by looking at the entry. A guy in a suit nervously flapped about near the entrance, fumbling and fidgeting, with a flop sweat on his hair and overlong brow that proclaimed him to be the most nervous nelly in New York at the moment. Of course, he was the head of security at a bank that was about to be robbed, and with a fifth of a trillion dollars in his care, I could imagine being a little nervous if I were in his place.

“Lt. Welch,” Corey Fairbine said, about two steps from wringing his hands as he waved us through the metal detectors, “Ms. Nealon, Mr. Treston.” He acknowledged each of us in turn, and I imagined his teeth chattering when he stopped speaking. Not from the cold, but from adrenaline. The guy had been a perfect example of a nervous chatterer the day or so I’d known him, and he was not improving as we got closer to zero hour.

Hopefully he’d settle down once this deal was done. “Mr. Fairbine,” I said, answering for the three of us, “is everything set?”

“Our security teams are in position with the NYPD SWAT team,” Fairbine said, like he was about to go to prom and his fly wouldn’t close. “I still want to express my discomfort at this notion. The scheme could have been broken up two days ago, the conspirators arrested—”

“We still don’t have the last conspirator,” I said. “The biggest, I might add. The brains behind the operation.” Whoever was giving Eric Simmons his orders had been pretty shy. We suspected it was a female, but it could have been a boyfriend for all we knew. Simmons had been watched for days, but he was pretty brilliant at disappearing, evading even our surveillance, which was troubling considering he supposedly didn’t know he was being watched.

That meant his “brain” was really smart, because everything we knew about Simmons told us he was dumber than a box of rocks.

“Never heard of a shy brain before,” Reed said as we followed Fairbine down the stairs toward the vaults. He walked with a hitch in his stride, and I wondered where the man had got it; he didn’t look like he’d hold up well in combat, so I discounted the military. “Shy kidneys, but not a shy brain.”

“You’d think that’d make it more difficult to produce thoughts while being watched,” Welch said, his attempt at a joke. Welch wasn’t funny, but he tried.

We worked our way down the stairwell. The building was old, but had been refurbished a lot. Tons of surveillance cameras everywhere. I hadn’t been to the ladies’ room, but there was probably one in every stall. I suspected the vault was laden with more than its fair share of them as well, which had me wondering what our criminals were planning to do to bring that particular obstacle down. I voiced this thought to Fairbine.

He shook as he answered. “If they’re able to create earthquakes all around the island of Manhattan, I don’t imagine it’d be terribly difficult to shake our cameras off the wall.” Good point, Nelly.

Fairbine opened the first vault door to us with a key card, exposing a half dozen NYPD uniforms in the waiting area outside the main vault. Welch and his boys had called us in on this gig after they’d tracked a string of bank robberies that were just a little too good for an ordinary criminal to have pulled off. His analysis, not mine. I don’t deal with normal criminals. The common thread had been seismic events, teeth-rattling earthquakes at the site of each robbery, vibrations that opened vaults and broke through walls like a rock star cracked through the brittle reserve of an excitable groupie.

Which is where my brother and I came into the picture. Man-made earthquakes that were actually made by a man? Sounded like a metahuman at work. Two days on the scene with Rocha and the rest of our crew and we’d narrowed our search to lower Manhattan. Another day and we’d found Eric Simmons and his basement hideaway. A little digging on our part (not literal) and we’d figured out their plan. After all, a group of bank-robbing criminals probably don’t rent out the basement suite across from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York because they’re genuinely interested in locating their mail-order business there. I mean, we ordered some of the sticky-tack from their website just in case, but I wasn’t holding my breath on that order being fulfilled, since J.J. back at headquarters had gotten us access to satellite imaging which had shown us their tunnel pretty clearly.