Ghostman (3 page)

Moreno gave him the open palm.
Run faster, you fat fuck
.

When they were within earshot, Ribbons shouted, “Heat coming in from the north. Open the damn car, let’s go!”

They were less than twenty feet apart. Now the cameras didn’t matter. Security couldn’t identify them in that sort of headgear. They sprinted back to their getaway car. Ribbons hopped over the concrete barrier and Moreno threw the passenger door open for him. Moreno would drive. The whole job had taken less than half a minute. Twenty-six seconds according to Ribbons’s Rolex. It was as easy as that: walk up, take the money and run. Moreno had an idiotic smile plastered on his face. He thought everything would go perfect. But no heist ever goes perfectly. There is always a problem.

Like the man sitting in the car on the other side of the parking garage, watching them through the scope of his rifle.

To Ribbons, what happened next was all a blur. One second he was getting into their car, and the next he heard the gunshot and saw Moreno hit. There was a spray of pink mist. Chunks of brain matter and fractured skull hit Ribbons straight on, like shrapnel from a grenade. Ribbons didn’t have time to think. He raised his Kalashnikov and sprayed lead blindly in the direction of the sound. There were flashes of light from one of the cars behind him, but Ribbons was out of bullets before he could target it. He got out of the Dodge, dropped the clip, took out another and charged it. He hadn’t even shouldered the rifle when a bullet punched a hole through the windshield. Ribbons took a bead on the flashes and returned fire. The next round came right at him. He scrambled around the car toward the driver’s seat, letting out shots in quick bursts. A bullet struck him in the shoulder. It hit a ceramic plate. It was a powerful blow that spun and staggered him, but he barely felt it. He recovered and kept shooting. Another shot hit him in the
chest above the belly. The hit felt like a sharp, immediate sting. Ribbons shouted. He was out of bullets.

He swore and dropped the empty rifle. He pulled a Colt 1911 from the small of his back and fired the gun one-handed, arm outstretched, no target in sight. The stupid mask had slid over one eye. He fired in quick double taps to give himself cover fire. A rifle round hit the pillar behind him and sent up a storm of powdered concrete and plaster. With his free hand he pulled Moreno’s body out of the driver’s seat. There was brain matter blown out all over the dash. Another round hit the trunk of the Dodge. Ribbons could hear it bouncing around against the chassis. The car was still running. Ribbons put it into Reverse. He didn’t even bother to close the door, which hung open until Ribbons was halfway through the two-point turn and momentum slammed it into place. He leaned over the seat and fired through the rear window. Then the mirror, a foot from his head, exploded.
Drive, you idiot
.

Ribbons burned rubber. The Dodge peeled out so quickly it slammed into the row of cars behind it and sent up a shower of sparks. Half blind from the mask and the blood, Ribbons shifted into Drive and barreled down the slope toward the garage entrance. There was no attendant in the booth this early, which was good because Ribbons couldn’t see where he was going. The beat-up Dodge crashed through the ticket machine, swiped the booth and fishtailed onto Pacific Avenue. The car careened through a red light and lost control down the wrong side of the road toward Park Place, where Ribbons ducked behind the steering wheel and floored the accelerator. The rims of his tires sent up sparks along the pavement. He could hear cops circling in the distance, going Code 3 with full sirens. Only blocks away now, close enough to be a problem. When he pulled the mask off, drops of sweat showered the dashboard. He glanced behind him. Nothing in the rear window yet. He weaved down the wide Atlantic City boulevards, still flooring it. Moreno, the wheelman, had planned the escape route down to the second. That plan had all gone to hell in ten seconds flat.

Ribbons spun the wheel and screeched through a parking lot and down an alleyway.

In less than ten minutes, the make and model of his car would be out to every cruiser and state trooper for fifty miles. He had to stash the car, the money and himself before the police caught up with him. But first he needed to put
distance
. It wasn’t until he’d turned onto Martin Luther King Boulevard that he felt the blood soaking through the clothing under his bulletproof vest. He touched the wound in his chest. It had gone through. Though the vest had slowed and deformed the bullet, it had still gone through twenty-seven layers of Kevlar into his flesh. It didn’t hurt, exactly. He had Moreno’s crank and a syringe of heroin to thank for that. But it was bleeding fast. He’d have to wash and wrap it if he wanted to stay alive. Proper treatment would wait until later. It would have to.

The phone rang again. That special ringtone. The caller had little tolerance for lateness, less for incompetence and none for failure. The man’s reputation relied on that sort of totalizing kind of fear that could cow federal agents and keep murderers and rapists as obedient as schoolchildren. His plans were precise, and he expected them to be followed precisely. Failure was never even discussed. Nobody Ribbons had ever met had failed him before. Nobody still around to talk about it, anyway.

Ribbons looked over at the phone, where it was lodged under the front seat, then reached over and killed the call with his thumb.

Ribbons tried to concentrate on the escape route, but all he could think about was his little blue house on the water. Through the drug haze, he could practically smell the old Victorian and feel the chipped paint on his fingertips. His first house. He kept the image of it in his mind, like a security blanket around the pain of the bullet lodged in his chest. He could make it. He had to. He had to.

Two minutes after six in the goddamn morning.

Two minutes after six in the goddamn morning, and the police were already out in full force, sweeping the streets for him. Two minutes after six in the goddamn morning, and word of the heist was already out to
the highway patrol and the FBI. Four people were dead. More than a million dollars stolen. Over a hundred bullet casings on the pavement. This would be one for the headlines.

It was two minutes after six in the goddamn morning, and the police had already woken their detectives.

It took another two hours for someone to wake me.

1

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

The shrill, high-pitched chirp of an incoming e-mail was like a bell ringing in my head. I woke with a start and immediately put a hand on my gun. I took gasping breaths as my eyes adjusted to the light coming off my security screens. I looked over to the windowsill where I’d set my watch. The sky was still as black as ink.

I took the gun out from under my pillow and put it on my night-stand. Breathe.

When I regained my composure I scanned the monitors. There was no one in the hallway or the elevator. Nobody in the stairs or the lobby. The only person awake was the night watchman, who looked too engrossed in a book to notice anything. My building was an old ten-story, and I was on the eighth floor. It was a seasonal sort of place, so there were year-round occupants in only about half the rooms and none of them ever got up early. Everyone was still asleep, or away for the summer.

My computer chirped again.

I’ve been an armed robber for close to twenty years. Paranoia comes
with the territory, as well as the stack of fake passports and hundred-dollar bills under the bottom drawer of my dresser. I started in this business in my teens. I did a few banks because I thought I’d like the thrill of it. I wasn’t the luckiest and I’m probably not the smartest, but I’ve never been caught, questioned or fingerprinted. I’m very good at what I do. I’ve survived because I’m extremely careful. I live alone, I sleep alone, I eat alone. I trust no one.

There are maybe thirty people on earth who know I exist, and I am not sure if all of them believe I’m still alive. I am a very private person out of necessity. I don’t have a phone number and I don’t get letters. I don’t have a bank account and I don’t have debts. I pay for everything in cash, if possible, and when I can’t, I use a series of black Visa corporate credit cards, each attached to a different offshore corporation. Sending me an e-mail is the only way to contact me, though it doesn’t guarantee I’ll respond. I change the address whenever I move to a different city. When I start getting messages from people I don’t know, or if the messages stop bearing important information, I microwave the hard drive, pack my things into a duffel and start all over.

My computer chirped again.

I ran my fingers over my face and picked up the laptop from the desk next to my bed. There was one new message in my in-box. All of my e-mails get redirected through several anonymous forwarding services before they reach me. The data goes through servers in Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Thailand before it gets chopped up and sent to accounts all over the world. Anybody tracing the IP wouldn’t know which was the real one. This e-mail had arrived at my first offshore address in Reykjavik some two minutes ago, where the server had encrypted it with my private-key 128-bit cipher. From there it had been forwarded to another address registered under a different name. Then another address, then another. Oslo, Stockholm, Bangkok, Caracas, São Paulo. It was daisy-chained down the line ten times with a copy in each in-box. Cape Town, London, New York, L.A., Tokyo. Now it was undetectable, untraceable, private and anonymous. The information had circled the world almost
twice before it got to me. It was in all these in-boxes, but my cipher key could unlock only one. I entered my pass code and waited for the message to decrypt. I could hear the hard drive doing a spin-up and the CPU beginning to work. Five in the morning.

Outside the sky was empty, except for a few lights on in the skyscrapers, which looked like foggy constellations. I’ve never liked July. Where I’m from the whole summer is intolerably hot. The security monitors had browned out for a few seconds the night before, and I had to spend two hours checking them. I opened a window and put my fan next to it. I could smell the shipping yard outside—old cargo, garbage and salt water. Across the train tracks the bay stretched out like a giant oil slick. That early in the morning, only a half dozen or so headlights cut through the darkness. The fishing boats cast rigger beams over the nets, and the early ferries were setting off from the harbor. The fog rolled in from Bainbridge Island and through the city, where the rain stopped and the cargo express cast a shadow from the track going east. I took my watch off the windowsill and put it on. I wear a Patek Philippe. It doesn’t look like much, but it will tell the correct time until long after everyone I’ve ever known is dead and buried, the trains stop running and the bay erodes into the ocean.

My encryption program made a noise. Done.

I clicked on the message.

The sender’s address had been obscured by all the redirects, but I knew instantly who it was from. Of the possibly thirty people who know how to contact me, only two knew the name in the subject line, and only one I knew for sure was alive.

Jack Delton.

My name isn’t really Jack. My name isn’t John, George, Robert, Michael or Steven, either. It isn’t any of the names that appear on my driver’s licenses, and it isn’t on my passports or credit cards. My real name isn’t anywhere, except maybe on a college diploma and a couple of school records in my safety-deposit box. Jack Delton was just an alias, and it was long since retired. I’d used it for a job five years ago and never
again since. The words blinked on the screen with a little yellow tag next to them to show that the message was urgent.

I clicked it.

The e-mail was short. It read:
Please call immediately
.

Then there was a phone number with a local area code.

I stared at it for a moment. Normally, when I got a message like this, I wouldn’t even consider dialing the number. The area code was the same as mine. I thought about this for a second and came up with two conclusions. Either the sender had been extraordinarily lucky or he knew where I was. Considering the sender, it was probably the latter. There were a few ways he could’ve done it, sure, but none of them would’ve been easy or cheap. Just the possibility that I’d been found should have been enough to send me running. I have a policy never to call numbers I don’t know. Phones are dangerous. It is hard to track an encrypted e-mail through a series of anonymous servers. Tracking someone by their cell phone is easy, however. Even regular police can trace a phone, and regular police don’t deal with guys like me. Guys like me get the full treatment. FBI, Interpol, Secret Service. They have rooms full of officers for that sort of thing.

I looked at the blinking name long and hard.
Jack
.

If the e-mail were from anyone else, I would’ve deleted it by now. If the e-mail were from anyone else, I’d be closing the account and deleting all my messages. If the e-mail were from anyone else, I’d be frying the computers, packing my duffel and buying a ticket for the next flight to Russia. I’d be gone in twenty minutes.

But it wasn’t from anyone else.

Only two people in the world knew that name.

I stood up and went to the dresser by my window. I pushed aside a pile of money and a yellow legal pad full of notes. When I’m not on a job, I translate the classics. I pulled a white shirt out of the drawer, a gray two-piece suit from the closet and a leather shoulder holster from my dresser. I fished a little chrome revolver from the box on top: a Detective Special with the trigger guard and hammer spur filed off. I filled it with
a handful of .38 hollow points. When I was dressed and ready, I took out an old prepaid international phone, powered it up and punched in the numbers.

The phone didn’t even ring. It just went right to connection.

“It’s me,” I said.

“You’re a hard man to find, Jack.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to come to my clubhouse,” Marcus said. “Before you ask, you still owe me.”