Thick as Thieves (3 page)

Behind it is a small utility closet, where electrical and telecom lines branch out from the conduits that carry them between floors to provide local service. There are junction boxes on the wall: gray for telecom, beige for electrical, flimsy white plastic for the security system. They’re mounted next to the vertical PVC conduits, and bundles of cable snake into and out of them. Carr pulls a penlight and a much handled sheaf of papers from his briefcase and flips pages to the plan of Molloy’s office.

The plans tell him that this closet is a recent addition, built when the original office space was subdivided. It shares a wall with another, larger utility closet in the suite next door—a hastily erected wall of gypsum board hung on metal studs. Carr raps on the board and it makes a hollow sound. He pulls a tape measure and a pencil from his bag, checks the plan, and marks a rectangle, two feet wide by three feet high, on the closet wall. Then he takes a headset out.

“You there, Vee?” he says.

“Where else?” she answers. “Everything okay?”

“Fine. Send them in.”

Carr looks out the window and watches Bobby and Latin Mike emerge from a rusting blue van parked nose out in the lot across the street. Each has a nylon bag slung on his shoulder, and each is carrying a Dell computer
box. Even from six floors up Carr can see the tension in their strides. They wear jeans, dark T-shirts, and sunglasses, but neither really looks the part of IT geek. Bobby comes close—scruffy, freckled, pale, and slightly bloated, as if he lives on fast food—but Mike is a far cry. His heavy shoulders and battered, angry good looks transcend wardrobe and typecast him as a hardcase, a badass, a thief. Still, Carr knows they’ll pass muster with the listless guards in the lobby. They disappear into the Prairie Galleria, and Carr looks again at the van. He tries to make out Valerie behind the wheel but can’t.

“Anybody else come in?” he asks.

“The painters and the carpet guys,” she answers, “about five minutes ago.”

“How many today?”

“Five—same as last week.”

The ever-hopeful owners of the Galleria have been painting walls and replacing the carpets in the building’s common areas, two floors every Saturday. Carr knows the schedule, and knows they’re working downstairs today, on four and five.

“Nobody else?”

“Not yet.”

There’s a knock on the door and Carr opens it for Bobby and Mike. Bobby pulls on gloves, looks around, and shakes his head. “What a dump. I had to sit here all day, I’d shoot myself.”

“That’s why it’s good you’re not an accountant,” Mike says.

“Molloy’s a lawyer,” Carr says. He points at the closet.

Bobby crouches at the wall, looking at Carr’s marks and rechecking the plan. He taps on the wall and shakes his head some more. “Sounds like quarter-inch. Cheap bastards.”

Bobby takes a drop cloth from his bag and spreads it beneath Carr’s rectangle. Then he removes plastic goggles, a battery-powered reciprocating saw, a set of blades in a plastic box, and a rectangular strip of heavy felt. He’s humming softly as he selects a blade, locks it in place, and wraps felt around the saw’s motor. Carr doesn’t know the tune, but knows that Bobby is nervous. Carr himself is fighting the desire to pace. Bobby squeezes the trigger on the saw and smiles at the dull whirring sound.

“Like a whisper,” he says. He wipes sweat off his forehead, sets the blade along a penciled line, and cuts. He’s quick and quiet and neat,
and in less than a minute he hands Carr a two-by-three-foot panel of wallboard.

“See—quarter-inch. I could’ve used my Swiss Army knife.” He takes a penlight from his bag and shines it in the hole he’s cut. He looks at the metal studs and the back of the wall in the utility closet next door. He taps the wall several times, then takes a Phillips-head screwdriver from his bag and punches a hole in the board. He turns to Latin Mike, who takes the screwdriver from Bobby and hands him the device he’s been assembling.

It’s an under-door camera, a hand-held video unit with a tiny lens mounted on the end of a thin metal snake. This model has its own light source and an infrared attachment. Bobby powers it up, feeds the snake through the hole, and starts working the controls. Mike leans over his shoulder and peers into the monitor. Carr gives them room and goes to the window.

The sky is yellow and greasy, and though it’s hours till noon, the sidewalk already shimmers with heat. Carr’s shirt is wet, stuck to his back and ribs, though only some of that is from the temperature. He takes a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes the back of his neck. He looks at the van and thinks of Valerie.

Last night, afterward, they’d been welded together by sweat. The droning of the air conditioner swallowed every other sound, and Valerie’s weight on him, and the heat that seeped from her to cover him, and the scent of her skin and of her hair that fell in a honey cascade across his shoulder, swallowed every thought of movement. They were perfectly still and perfectly quiet until she spoke, softly, in his ear.

As he had many times since the first day he’d met her, Carr wondered about Valerie’s accent. Like so much else about her it was malleable, indeterminate, like smoke. There were hints of Canada in it sometimes, around the edges of her r’s, and at other times a suggestion of farther corners of the Commonwealth—South Africa, or maybe Australia. Other times her speech was flat and neutral, like a newscaster’s—straight out of Kansas. It was as supple as the rest of her—stretching, bending, shaping itself like putty to suit the job at hand. Last night, her accent was diluted British, a Surrey childhood not quite undone by decades in the States. He’d heard that one before. He’d heard the sentiment too, though not as often. Twice before, to be exact, twice in the four months they’d been sleeping together.

“We could sleep in. Get room service. Spend the day in bed.”

Speaking was an effort for Carr, his words rising up from deep water. “There’s no room service here, and we have plans for tomorrow.”

“I’m not talking about tomorrow, or about this dump. I’m talking about afterward, someplace with a real bed. Someplace we could take time.”

“Time for what?”

“Time out. Time to see what’s what—what this is all about.”

“Are you asking me to go steady?”

Valerie hadn’t laughed or snapped, but simply kissed his ear and gone quiet for a while. “You told me this was it for you,” she said eventually. “You said so more than once. So you need to plan for afterward. I’m saying that maybe our plans can line up.”

Twice before, and last night was lucky number three. Carr still didn’t know what to make of it.

Bobby calls him back. He has the saw in hand again, and Latin Mike is stowing the camera. “It’s clean in there—no motion detectors, no infrared, just four walls and a door—your basic utility closet.”

Four walls, a door, more junction boxes, and the processing unit of Portrait Capital’s security system, which is to Jerry Molloy’s alarm as a Porsche is to a vegetable peeler. And that’s fitting, as Molloy’s office holds only yellowing tax files, while Portrait Capital’s safeguards more substantial assets.

There are no golden bezants over the door, no neon signs in the window, and no furtive customers lurking out front, but Portrait Capital—Marius Lucovic, founder—is nonetheless a pawn shop, albeit an upmarket one. It doesn’t trade in forlorn wedding rings, Grandma’s sad china, or handguns of dubious provenance, but the basic deal offered at Portrait—valuables handed over as collateral against a loan—is the same as what’s on the table down by the bus station, and the customers are similarly desperate. There are differences, of course: the pawnbrokers at Portrait Capital may be seen by appointment only; they deal exclusively in works of art, authenticated antiques, and pieces of serious jewelry; and the smallest loan that Portrait will consider is for a quarter of a million dollars. Lucovic started the company just after the crash, and business has always been brisk.

Which would, at first glance, seem to explain the motion detectors, pressure sensors, and video cameras, but not quite. While it’s true that Portrait Capital often has valuable items on its premises, they’re never there for longer than a few hours at a time, and never overnight. Any collateral brought to the office is sent out again by armored courier at the end of the day, to a high-security, climate-controlled warehouse near Ellington Airport. So all the hardware Lucovic installed at the Prairie Galleria is not to defend his high-priced pawn. No, it’s to protect the inventory of an entirely different Lucovic enterprise—fencing diamonds.

Diamonds have always been Lucovic’s specialty, from his first jewelry store smash-and-grab as a teenager in Zagreb, to his days running conflict stones into Western Europe. Diamond money bought him his ticket to the States, his house in River Oaks, his condos in Vegas and L.A., and the nut to start Portrait Capital. Diamond money is what he launders, month in and month out, through Portrait’s several bank accounts, and diamonds are what Carr and Bobby and Latin Mike have come to carry off.

Bobby cuts through the wallboard into Portrait Capital’s utility closet—another neat two-by-three-foot section—gets down on all fours, and crawls through. Mike is next, pushing the computer boxes and tool bags, and Carr is last.

This closet is three times the size of Jerry Molloy’s, a small room really, and the beams of Bobby’s and Mike’s utility lanterns cast heavy shadows in the corners. Carr brushes off his pants and joins Mike and Bobby in gazing at the security unit—a large black box, forbiddingly blank but for the name, Ten Argus, in yellow.

Bobby wipes his face on his sleeve and kneels beside the processor. He runs his hand along the bottom edge of the black box, finds a latch, and opens the cover. Inside is an array of densely packed circuit boards, banks of status lights, and three cooling fans. Cables from the sensors installed throughout the office suite feed in through a conduit at the back of the box, along with two dedicated telephone lines and the power supply. Two gray bricks sit at the bottom of the box—backup batteries. Bobby trains his light on it all and stares, as if searching a crowd for a familiar face. He shakes his head.

“It looks different,” Bobby says softly. He reaches into a bag and pulls out several sheets of circuit diagrams and starts to hum. He studies the diagrams, while Mike unpacks one of the Dell boxes—Styrofoam, a laptop, a bulky antistatic bag, and cables. Carr gives in to the engine racing in his chest, and paces the little room—four paces by three. He walks to the door, puts his hand on the knob, and imagines what would happen if he opened it and walked across a pressure sensor or stepped into a crossfire of infrared beams. No Klaxons or cruisers, Carr knows—Lucovic doesn’t welcome attention, and especially not from the police—but a fast, armed response, the security company guards first, followed closely by Lucovic’s own men.

“Okay,” Bobby says to no one. He’s found what he’s looking for in the
thicket of chips, and he folds his diagrams away. Mike powers up the laptop. Bobby opens the antistatic bag and pulls out a large circuit board. He sets the board beside the security system and cables it to the laptop. Carr can see, in the dense mosaic of chips on the board, two large chips with the
TEN ARGUS
label. Bobby kneels over the laptop and starts typing.

Bobby calls it the Ten Zombie, and he and Dennis built it with specs and components they pinched from a dealer in Sugar Land, whose own offices were scandalously insecure.
Zombie
because, once connected, it will look to the monitoring units on the other end of the dedicated phone line just like the Ten Argus unit installed in the humid little room at Portrait Capital, though in fact it is a hollowed out version of that system, receiving input from no sensors, and reporting only what Bobby instructs it to report. And Bobby has directed it to murmur incessantly that everything is perfectly fine.

Connecting it—swapping the Zombie for the real thing—is the tricky part: the monitor software makes allowances for power surges and line glitches, and that’s what Bobby wants the swap to look like, but his window is only seven seconds wide. Latin Mike and Bobby stand by the black box, Mike’s hands poised over the phone jacks, Bobby’s over the power lines. Carr holds the laptop and the Zombie board, and keeps his eye on his watch. They’ve practiced this a hundred times or more.

“On three,” Bobby says.

They finish with two seconds to spare, not their best time but close. Bobby checks and rechecks the laptop screen, watching the back-and-forth over the phone lines. He gives a thumbs-up and closes the laptop, and Carr gives up an ancient breath. Mike shakes the tension from his arms and shoulders. Their shirts are dark with sweat.

Bobby and Mike pick up the tools and the boxes, and Carr opens the door. The air in the corridor is ten degrees cooler. He blinks in the light, wipes his eyes, and touches his headset.

“We’re in,” he says.

“Making good time,” Valerie answers.

“Things okay down there?”

“It’s a fucking swamp,” she says.

The office suite is done up in leather and dark wood, someone’s notion of staid and bankerly, as gleaned from watching old TV shows. It reminds Carr of a funeral home. Carr leads the way to Lucovic’s office,
skirting the reception area where the video cameras stand watch. They pass a floor safe, a glossy, black monster with a handle like a ship’s wheel, and the name of a long-defunct bank in gold leaf across the front. It’s empty, they know, but Mike gives it an affectionate pat.

Lucovic’s office is locked, but not seriously, and once Carr opens it, Mike and Bobby make space. Lucovic’s leather chair goes to one side of the room, and his mahogany desk goes to the other, which leaves a wide patch of gray carpet in front of the mahogany credenza that stretches across the back wall. There are bookshelves on top of it and file drawers beneath, and behind one set of drawers—the false ones—is the safe.

It’s a Guard-Rite T2100, with steel skin, six thick bolts that anchor it firmly to the floor, and room enough inside to accommodate four bowling balls. Mike spins the combination dial. It’s an Ames and Landrieu R720 lock package, and he’s drilled ten of them in the past two weeks. Today will make eleven. He opens the other Dell box and unpacks his tools.