Ghostman (15 page)

KUALA LUMPUR

On the first morning of the Asian Exchange job, Angela walked across the hall from her bedroom in our shared suite, came into my room and woke me up. She picked up the alarm clock on the bedside table and held it next to my ear. It went off and I jumped. She used to criticize me for being such a sound sleeper. When she slept, it was in hour-long bursts punctuated by insomniac pacing and the occasional cigarette. When I slept, it was like passing into a coma.

“Meeting in an hour,” she said.

It took me a moment to blink and get my bearings. Angela was wearing a blue pantsuit with a gold name tag that had the insignia of the hotel on it.
Mandarin Oriental, Kuala Lumpur
. It said her name was Mary. I don’t know how she got the uniform but she looked convincing in it, even as a white woman in an Asian city. Her makeup was perfect. She had the thick eye shadow of an exhausted hotel worker. Her shoes were worn-out flats. I looked out the window. The sun was already reflecting off the skyscrapers next to us.

I turned off the alarm.

Angela had an energetic beauty about her—she was an actress, and she had trained for it in college. All I had done in college was read and translate Latin and ancient Greek. I’d never even gone to see any plays, because the whole concept of acting was off my radar back then. I didn’t crave attention, I craved anonymity. All I wanted was to do my translations and be left alone. Angela changed all that. She showed me how, by being nobody, I could be anyone I wanted. She provided my real education. I copied people’s signatures until I could write in anyone’s hand. I learned how to transform the muscles in my larynx until I could speak in anyone’s voice. I studied the differences in posture and syntax. But most of all, Angela taught me that I didn’t need to be perfect, I needed to be convincing. She once handed me a toy police shield and told me to get a piece of evidence from a real crime scene. I got past the yellow tape, picked up a bullet casing with a pair of tweezers and walked away with it in a plastic bag. That was one of her final tests for me. That’s how she knew I was ready.

I moved over to the edge of the bed that morning and sat up. She looked at me, arms crossed, said she was putting on a pot of coffee, then left. When I got out of the shower, she handed me a fresh cup, no cream, no sugar, and told me to get my ass in gear.

She never liked waiting for anything.

The video conference with Marcus happened right there in the sitting room of our suite. In the center of the table were twelve small golden keys, two for each of us, except for the wheelman Alton Hill, who wouldn’t do anything but drive. We didn’t know what the keys were for at that point, but we’d find out soon enough. All we knew then was that we were supposed to take care of them and take them with us everywhere for the duration of the heist. The room also had a large flat-screen TV with a glowing green camera attached by a wire. Back then, Internet video conferencing was less common than it is now. I remember being fascinated at how Marcus’s face jerked and paused on the screen. It was the middle of the afternoon where he was, nearly eight thousand miles away, yet it felt like he was there in the room with us.
We gathered around the table as he described the job. In order to get it all done, we were going to have to start right away. No questions, no second-guessing. His voice was matter-of-fact. He spoke slowly, so we wouldn’t miss anything.

“In two weeks,” he said, “each one of you will be two and a half million dollars richer.”

The take was a block of foreign currencies for the exchange market, the value of which changed depending on who you asked and at what time of day. Liquidated, it was something like seventeen or eighteen million dollars. Yen, baht, yuan, ringgit, you name it. Even with traveler’s checks and credit cards, huge sums of these foreign paper currencies found their way overseas every month.

A German-based exchange company was the target. It shipped all their displaced Asian currency back here, to the financial equivalent of a weigh station, before distributing it back into the local economies.

The setting was the high-finance Bank of Wales in an office tower on Jalan Ampang. The money was counted and put in the vault there temporarily, then packaged and sent by armored trucks to the airport to be shipped back to the countries of origin. The armored trucks never moved more than about one and a half million U.S. dollars’ worth of currency at any one time, and never did deliveries more frequently than once every hour, on the hour. The vault was top of the line. Time sensitive, time delay, triple custody. In order to take the entire load, we would have to be creative. We would have to do what professional armed robbers usually consider suicide. We would have to drill the vault, which meant we would have to take over the bank.

For at least an hour.

Takeover heists are very risky. They’re very rare too. Most bank robberies are as simple as you can imagine. A person walks into a bank wearing a hoodie and sunglasses and hands the teller a slip of paper asking for all the money. The teller empties all the cash from the drawers and the robber leaves. There are no guards anymore, so it’s as easy as that. The problem is, there isn’t a whole lot of money to be gained that way.
There might be ten or fifteen thousand in those drawers, but that’s it. In order to get
real
money, you have to do the whole bank takeover-style, with masks and guns and precision timing. The take’s bigger by ten or twenty times because you’ll get all the money in the vault too. But the risk’s much higher. Go in armed, and you have only two minutes to get out. Even if you don’t have any money yet, you leave after two minutes because that is the minimum amount of time it takes for someone to trigger a silent alarm and for the police to mount a response. Each second longer, and your chances of going to prison increase tenfold. If you’re there for five minutes, the robbery’s gone wrong. If you’re there for ten minutes, the robbery’s botched beyond repair. If you’re there for thirty minutes or more, the robbery’s the last thing you’ll ever do.

And that’s what we were planning: in order to drill the vault, we’d have to be inside for at least an hour, maybe more.

There would be multiple issues. The first was damage control. A takeover heist means hostages. Hostages mean guard duty. We needed someone watching them at all times. If someone wasn’t, one of them might get brave. If one got brave, somebody could get hurt. If someone got hurt, more people would get brave. Rinse, repeat—people start dying. None of us liked the prospect of killing anybody whose only mistake was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We’d need a guy, maybe two guys, to act as babysitters.

Location was another problem. The bank was in a skyscraper thirty-five stories up. Once the word of the situation got out, security on ground level would shut down all the elevators, effectively barring our exit. Even if we managed to get all the way up there wearing masks and carrying guns, we had a very good chance of getting stuck.

The third problem was the getaway. Jalan Ampang, one of the city’s most important arteries, is nine lanes wide and runs past a quarter mile of skyscrapers, restaurants and hotels. In the middle of the morning it would be packed with traffic and pedestrians, which meant there would also be a lot of cops. There was a freeway just a block to the north of our target, but the nearest on-ramp was four blocks west. Not to mention
that if the alarms went, an hour would be enough time for the Royal Malaysian Police to set up a barrier and wait for the military to send in helicopters.

And finally, even if we somehow managed to get out of the bank and away from the cops, then we’d have to get the money out of the country. Seventeen to eighteen million dollars in relatively low-value foreign currency could weigh anywhere between ten and twenty metric tons. I’m talking about bricks of money the size of hay bales that could fill up a fairly large semi. If we loaded it all onto a waiting jet, it would be too heavy for the plane to make it off the runway.

Marcus’s voice was dry as stone as he laid out the whole thing, step by step. He presented all the problems, then the solutions, one by one. Angela was wrong about him. Marcus wasn’t intelligent. A dog could be intelligent. A kid playing chess could be intelligent. A guy doing his own taxes could be intelligent.

Marcus was
genius
.

Vincent, the loudmouth of the group, said very clearly, so everyone could hear, “How the hell are we going to move that much money?”

“You’re not,” Marcus said. “It’s never going to leave the building.”

21

ATLANTIC CITY

I was woken by a sound coming from the room Lakes had bought me.

As soon as I heard it, my eyes shot open and my pulse quickened. I sat up and suddenly froze, focusing all the energy in my body on listening. I held my breath and pulled the gun out from under the pillow. I looked at my watch. It was just a few minutes to 2 a.m.

It was a hard sound that suggested some sort of heavy movement, similar to the scraping sound a big cardboard box makes when you push it around. Modern hotels have thick, insulated walls. Gone are the days of banging against the headboard, trying to get the amorous couple in the next room to quit it. They use solid doors now and make the walls extra thick, with two layers of foam filler between them. All the sounds made in one room get absorbed into the foam, just like in a recording studio. That meant that if I could hear a sound in here, the sound would be five or six times as loud in there.

I moved very quietly off the edge of the bed and slid on a pair of pants. I put the gun in my pocket, just in case, and picked up one of the
complimentary water glasses off the dresser. I crept slowly over to the door between me and room 316 and carefully pressed the glass against it as a listening device. The walls might be soundproof, but the interior doors are just wood. There was a tense moment of silence when I heard only the low thud of my heartbeat and the almost-imperceptible tick of my wristwatch. I waited for the sound to happen again, just to prove to myself that I hadn’t been dreaming.

It happened again.

Somebody was pushing the furniture around. I could hear a strained groan of exertion and the low, hard grind of the bed frame shifting over the wall-to-wall carpeting. The groan sounded distinctly female. I could hear her swear once as she pushed. She had a deep voice, a beautiful voice, like she’d once been a singer. I heard the rustle of the bedsheets as she pulled them off, and the flop of the mattress as she turned it over. She mumbled to herself as she worked, but her words were garbled and formless.

I’d bet anything it was the FBI agent.

I knew exactly what she was doing.

She was tossing the joint.

Rebecca Blacker was searching every part of the room, from floor to ceiling, so she wouldn’t miss any hiding spots. I heard her take the large generic painting off the wall and fling it on the bed. A moment later, she opened the closet and brushed aside all the metal hangers. I waited to hear what she would do next, but nothing happened for another quiet minute. I could hear her talking, but I couldn’t make out the words. I wondered if someone else was in room, but then ruled against it. If she were talking to someone, that person would’ve talked back.

She must have gotten a key card from the hotel manager. The police need a warrant to search a hotel room only if the hotel manager says no. Managers rarely say no. Police raids are bad for business, sure, but not as bad as having a reputation for harboring criminals. Not in a place this nice, anyway.

Careful not to make a sound, I put the glass down and walked over to the hallway door with almost glacial slowness, then put my good left eye up against the peephole. I looked left and right as far as the limits of the fisheye lens would let me.

Feds have a tendency to work in groups—even when only one agent’s assigned to a case, sometimes people from local law enforcement work alongside. I half-expected to look out my peephole and see a uniformed cop out there, or a guy in a rumpled sweatsuit with a detective’s shield, or another cheap suit with an FBI badge standing guard. But I was in luck.

She was alone.

Across the hall was a room-service cart with upturned metal covers and a couple of dirty plates stacked on top of it. Other than that, though, it looked like we were completely alone. The hall was empty as far as I could see.

I knew what I should have done. If Angela were there, she would’ve thrown the overnight bag in my hands and told me to get the hell out right away. She would have told me to walk calmly and directly toward the emergency-exit staircase and go immediately to the basement. From there I’d cut through the kitchen, go out into the garage and get in my car. If she were in charge, she would’ve yelled at me for being so stupid as to trust a concierge service to book my hotel room. She would’ve rushed into action the very moment she heard the sound.

But Angela wasn’t around.

And I was curious.

I slowly put on my new shirt, jacket and tie, which was difficult because I didn’t want to turn on any of the lights. I ran my fingers through my hair a couple of times to make sure I didn’t look like I’d just climbed out of bed, then grabbed my bag and went out the door.

The hallway was completely empty, and the door to the room Lakes had bought me was closed. I moved up to it and tried to look through the peephole, but those aren’t designed to work like that. All I could see was a blurry splotch the color of the hotel curtains.

I ducked back into 317 and pulled a page from the pad of hotel stationery. I wrote
Courtesy of J. Morton
on the paper, along with one of my new prepaid–cell phone numbers. I went back out into the hallway and placed the note over the bill on the empty service cart. I put the metal covers back on the plates, until the cart looked mostly full, then slowly rolled the cart over to 316. If she opened the door now, she couldn’t miss it.

I walked down the hallway toward the elevators, took the magnetic key card out of my pocket and snapped it in two. I pushed through the doors to the stairs and took them two at a time. The woman was in my head the whole way. She knew my face now, sure, but I also knew hers. Better yet, I knew her name and her badge number. If I could get to a computer, I could access everything there was to know about her. Something in me wanted to find out.