The Heaven Trilogy (41 page)

The events of the days leading up to this one slipped through his mind. No need to be overzealous here—he still had time to abort phase two.

He’d escaped Denver easily enough, and the bus trip to Mexico City had flown by like a surrealistic scene on the silver screen. Yet once in the massive city, a certain deadening euphoria had taken to his nerves. He’d rented a room in an obscure dump some enterprising soul had the stomach to call a hotel and immediately set about finding the plastic surgeon he’d made contact with a month earlier. Dr. Emilio Vasquez.

The surgeon readily took a thick wad of money and set about giving Kent a new look. The fact that Kent’s “new look” should have required four operations instead of the one did not deter Vasquez in the least. It was, after all, his trademark— doing to a man’s face in one operation what took most plastic surgeons three months. It was also why Kent had chosen the man. He simply did not have three months. The rest of his plan was begging for its execution.

Four days after the big fire Kent had his new look, hidden under a heavy mask of white gauze, but there, Dr. Vasquez promised him. Definitely there. The twinkle in the surgeon’s eyes had worried him. It was the first time he’d considered the possibility that he might spend the rest of his life looking like something out of a horror comic. But done was done. He’d sequestered himself in the hotel room, willing the cuts beneath the facial bandages to heal. It was a time that both stretched his patience and settled his nerves at once.

Kent lifted the chrome platter from the table and stared at his reflection. His tanned face looked like a Kevin, he thought. Kevin Stillman, his new assumed name. The nose was fuller, but it was the jaw line and brow work that changed his face so that he hardly recognized his own reflection. The plastic surgeon had done an exceptional job—although the first time Dr. Vasquez had removed the bandages and proudly shoved a mirror to his face he’d nearly panicked. Then, the red lines around his nose and cheekbones brought to mind frightening images of Frankenstein. Oh, he looked different, all right. But then, so did a skinned plum. He started to drink heavily that night. Tequila, of course, lots of it, but never enough to knock him silly. That would be stupid, and he was over being stupid.

Besides, too much liquor made the computer screen swim before his eyes, and he’d spent a lot of time staring at the laptop those first two weeks. Whereas ROOS-TER allowed him undetected access into the banking system, it was that second program, the one called BANDIT, that had actually done the deed. When he had inserted his little disk into the drive that night at the bank and executed his theft, he’d left a little gift in each target account from which he’d taken twenty cents. And by all accounts the program had executed itself flawlessly. Indeed, BANDIT worked on the same principles as a stealth virus, executing commands to hide itself at the first sign of penetration. But that was not all it did. In the event the account was even so much as queried, it would first transfer twenty cents from one of Kent’s holding accounts back into the target account, and then it would immediately remove itself permanently. The entire operation took exactly one and a half seconds and was over by the time the account-information screen popped to life on the operator’s monitor. In the end it meant that any queried account would show erroneous charges on printed statements but not in the accounts themselves.

Kent’s little virus executed itself on 220,345 accounts in the first two weeks, refunding a total of $44,069 dollars during that time. The virus would lay dormant in the rest of the accounts, waiting until September 2000 to be opened. They would obediently delete themselves if not activated within fourteen months.

It took two full weeks before he felt comfortable enough to make his first trip to the bank in Mexico City. The lines on his face were still visible, but after applying a pound of makeup he succeeded in convincing himself that they were virtually undetectable. And he was at the point of driving himself crazy in the hotel room. It was either risk a few raised brows in the bank or hang himself with the bedsheets.

The banking official at Banco de Mexico had indeed raised his brow when Kent visited under the name Matthew Brown. It was not the way Mr. Brown looked that had him jumping, it was the five-hundred-thousand-dollar cash withdrawal he’d executed. Of course the official had almost certainly reported the unusual amount—even banks that promise discretion keep a log of such transfers. But Kent hardly cared. The maze of accounts through which the money had traveled over the last two weeks would require pure fortune to unravel. If any man were able to track the funds back to either Kent Anthony or the fire in Denver, they deserved to see him fry.

But that just wasn’t going to happen.

That first five hundred thousand dollars brought a thrill to Kent’s bones that he had not felt for months. He’d popped the latches of the black case he’d purchased for just this occasion and dumped the cash onto the moth-eaten bedspread in the hotel room. Then he’d stripped the piles of their rubber bands and physically rolled through them, tossing the bills into the air and letting them float lazily to the floor while pumping his fists and hooting in victory. It was a wonder the neighbors did not come pounding on his door. Possibly because there were no neighbors foolish enough to pay five hundred pesos a night to sleep in the miserable dump. He touched every bill, he thought, counting and recounting them all in a hundred different configurations. Of course he’d had little else to do then besides monitor the computer—that was his reasoning. Then he’d discarded his reasoning and celebrated by drinking himself into a two-day stupor.

It was his first alcoholic binge.

He started his well-rehearsed withdrawal plan then, flying first to Jakarta, then to Cairo, then to Geneva, then to Hong Kong, and finally here, to the Turks and Caicos Islands. At each stop he’d traveled under false identification papers, withdrawn large sums of money, and departed quickly. After each visit to a bank he’d taken the liberty of waltzing into its system using ROOSTER and isolating the links to the closed account. Bottom line, even if the local banking officials wanted to know more about the strange man who’d emptied their daily cash reserves with his massive withdrawal, they would find nothing.

He’d arrived a week ago in the islands packing just over six million dollars. All of it in cash, every last dollar untraceable. He’d become Kevin Stillman then and bought the villa. Fourteen million dollars, give or take, still waited around the world, gathering interest.

Yes indeed, to say that he’d pulled it off might very well be the century’s greatest understatement. He had
rocked!
A dead man had ripped off twenty million bucks right under the nose of the almighty United States banking system, and not a soul suspected it was even gone!

That had been phase one.

Phase two had started one week after the fire, two days after Kent had received his new face. And it was phase two that was responsible for these raging emotions of insecurity now charging in to disturb the peace.

Maybe he should have been satisfied to take the $20 million minus the $44,069 and call it even. But in reality the thought hardly even occurred to him. This was not simply a matter of his getting what was coming to him; it was also a matter of Borst and Bentley getting what was coming to
them
. Some would call it revenge. Kent thought of it as justice. Putting things back the way they were meant to be. Or at least one version of how they were meant to be.

It was why he had planted a copy of ROOSTER on both Borst’s and Bentley’s hard drives several nights before executing the theft. And it was why he had made that first visit to their computers one week after the fire.

They already had routine access to AFPS, of course, and now they had untraceable access as well without knowing it. Only it was Kent in there doing the accessing, using their computers from remote stations. And the stuff he was accessing was not the stuff he was supposed to be accessing. Or rather it was not the kind of stuff
they
should be accessing. Naughty, naughty.

Over the course of three weeks, Kent had helped them steal money on seven different occasions. Small amounts of money—between three and five hundred dollars per whack—just enough to establish a trail. That was his little contribution to their burgeoning wallets, although to look at their private balances they certainly needed no help from him. Their contributions had been to keep the money. So far anyway. Whether because they were exceedingly greedy or because they simply did not know, Kent neither knew nor cared.

He considered all of this, set his drink back on the silver tray, and pressed his fingers together contemplatively. It had gone so smoothly that it would slip through the most sensitive digestive system unnoticed.

So then why the jitters?

Because everything up to this point had been a warmup of sorts. And now the computer sat on his table, wanting him to push the final buttons.

Kent grunted and wiped the sweat from his palms. “Well, we didn’t come all this way to weasel out in the end, did we?” Of course not. Although it would certainly not hurt. And it would certainly be the wisest course, all things considered. It would . . .

“Shut up!” he snarled at himself.

Kent leaned forward and worked quickly now. He brought up ROOSTER from Borst’s hard drive and then entered AFPS. He was into the bank’s records.

Now the excitement of the moment brought a quiver to his bones. He brought up Borst’s personal account and scanned the dozens of transactions recorded over the last few weeks. All seven deposits accommodated by him were still present. Thank heaven for small favors! He grinned and scanned down.

There were a few other deposits there as well. Large deposits. Deposits that made Kent squint. The bank was obviously paying him for AFPS. Nothing else could possibly account for a two-hundred-thousand-dollar balance.

“Not so fast, Fat-Boy,” Kent muttered.

He selected
all
of the deposits with a single click of the mouse, ten in all including his own, and removed them from Borst’s account to a holding account he’d built into ROOSTER. The account balance immediately dropped to an overdrawn status. Overdrawn by the $31,223 in checks Borst had written this month. He was spending his hard-earned money quickly. Well, this would give him pause.

And
this . . . will give you a hernia!

Kent broke into the bank’s primary accounting system, selected the primary bank reserves, and transferred five hundred thousand dollars to Borst’s account. Using ROOSTER of course. He didn’t want the authorities to know what had happened to the money. Not yet.

He posted a flag on the federal account and retreated to Borst’s account. In the morning some lucky operator at Niponbank’s headquarters in Japan would bring his computer up to find a nasty flag announcing the overnight disappearance of a half-million dollars from the bank’s main account. Bells would clang, horns would blow, nostrils would flare. But nobody would discover the fate of the money, because it was as of yet unfindable. That was the beauty of ROOSTER.

Kent squirmed in his chair. Borst’s account now showed a very healthy balance of over four hundred thousand dollars. He stared at the figure and considered leaving it. The ultimate carrot for Mr. Borst. Go ahead. Spend it, baby.

He discarded the notion. A plan was a plan. Instead he transferred the money to the same hidden account he’d set up for the other deposits, returning Borst’s account to an overdrawn status. The man was going to wake up to the shock of his life.

Kent smirked, exceedingly happy for the moment.

He retreated from Borst’s account and ventured into Bentley’s. There he repeated the same steps, placing all of the bank president’s money into another hidden account prepared for the occasion.

The porky twins were now very, very broke.

It was time to get out. Kent pulled out of the system, broke his connection, and sat back in the lounger. Sweat ran down his chest in small rivulets, and his hands were shaking.

“See how it feels, you greedy pigs,” he sneered. And then he lifted his glass and threw back the remaining liquor.

Yes indeed. It was all going exactly as planned. And to this point, not a soul knew a thing.

Except Lacy, possibly. He’d said a bit much to her that night.

Or possibly that pinhead cop.

The emotion hit him then, full force, as if a lead weight had been neatly aimed from heaven and dropped on the half-naked man lounging on the deck so smugly down there. It felt as though a hole had been punched through his chest. A vacancy. The gnawing fear that it had all gone too smoothly. That in the end this dream facing him in the eyes would not be a dream at all but some kind of nightmare dressed up in sheep’s clothing. That trying to live now, surrounded by his millions but without Gloria or Spencer . . . or Lacy . . .

He shook his head to clear the thought. On the other hand, there was no evidence at all that Lacy or the cop knew anything. And someday soon, perhaps, there would be another Gloria or another Lacy. Maybe. And another Spencer.

No, never another Spencer.

Kent rose, snatched the glass, and strode for the kitchen. It was time for another drink.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

TWO THOUSAND miles northwest that same evening Lacy Cartwright stood over her stove struggling to flip the massive omelet she’d concocted in the shallow frying pan. She had no idea how she was going to eat the beast, but its aroma was staging a full assault on her senses, and she swallowed her saliva.

Her mind drifted back to the party Jeff Duncan had insisted she attend. The affair had been far too telling. She’d left after an hour of the foolishness and had to fend off a dozen questions the next workday. In the end she had succumbed to a little white lie. She had gotten sick. Which was, after all, true in heart-matters. Because she was still sick over this whole robbery issue. She knew he had done it—knew it like she knew the weasel was sitting on some beach somewhere, soaking up the rays.