Clawback (21 page)

“What I was thinking,” Clara said, raising her empty coffee cup toward the counter, “was that maybe you had access to other resources.”

“Huh?”

“To find Plank.”

“He’s gone. Like you said.”

“But you’re an investigator. Aren’t you?”

And a damn good one, I felt like saying, but of course it wasn’t so. The sad truth of our profession is that mostly you just ask the same questions over and over, to more and more dull-witted participants, until you get lucky. I had a little more leeway than my
state-licensed colleagues—I could hit someone in the face if they needed it, for example—but that helps less than you might think.

Apart from internet databases, the job hasn’t changed much since the Pinkertons were tracking the James Gang.

The waitress swung by with refills.

“I could call around,” I said. “But it won’t get us anywhere. Plank has good reason to dive into a bunker. No one’s going to see him until he’s ready to come out.”

Clara wasn’t giving up. “If you
do
find Plank, you call me first, okay? I’ll even cut you in on the exclusive, if you want. It’ll be worth a fortune.”

Ganderson, Johnny and now Clara. Everyone wanted me to do their legwork for them.

“You’re star-one on the speed dial,” I promised.

Some syrup slopped, and I wiped my face with a napkin. I’d forgotten about the scrape from last night, and I must have winced when I rubbed over it.

“So what happened?” Clara asked. “Fall off another helicopter?”

“Feels like it.” I told her about running into Hayden, and the fistfight.

“He was going to
kill
you? Did you call the police?”

“He wouldn’t really have done it.” Shows how much perspective I was losing around Clara—I’d forgotten she was a civilian. “I wouldn’t have let him.”

“But—”

“And no, I didn’t call 911. The matter was settled.”

She frowned. “Are you sure?”

“Well…”

“Anyway, I thought you said the district attorney would put him in jail.”

It
was
curious that Hayden was still out wandering around, waving a pistol at semi-innocent people on the street.

“I’m not sure what to think about Hayden,” I said. “He couldn’t have shot Marlett. For that matter, he didn’t even know Marlett was coming after the money Hayden lost until I braced him that night. The timing doesn’t work.”

“What you’re describing, though, he sounds fishy.”

“Fishy.”

“Crooked, even. He could be the kingpin.”

“‘
Kingpin’
?”

“The criminal mastermind.” She laughed. “Who hires gunsels to do the wet work.”

“You don’t watch movies made later than 1940?”

A group of kids came in, truants from some stratosphere prep school, and jammed themselves into a booth at the window. Two mothers dawdled over their coffee, children asleep in a double stroller blocking the aisle. A beam of painfully bright sunlight reflected off a glass skyscraper across the street, falling across one of the babies, who woke up with those tentative, prewailing coughs. The mother lifted him out and calmed him down.

“I had a letter a couple days ago,” I said. “Out of the blue.”

“A letter?”

“You know—paper. In an envelope.”

“And this is unusual, for you?” Clara didn’t seem surprised.

“Right, well, he says he’s a long-lost brother I never knew about.”

“No!”

I told her the story Dave Ellins had written, and about looking him up online.

“You think it’s true?”

“His picture—it was like looking in a mirror. I don’t know what to think.”

“Seems like there are only two alternatives. Either someone’s running an awfully complicated scam—”

“The photos didn’t seem faked, but any idiot can use Photoshop.”

“It’s not that easy.” She finished the last of her grapefruit. “The other option is he’s for real. Nothing complicated.”

“No,” I said. “No such thing in my life.
Everything’s
complicated.”

The letter had been on my mind. The more I ran the sentences through my head, the more ominous they became.
I was out there, few years back. Guess I know what kind of accountant that makes you, huh?

Dave could be my brother, or not. Either way he was a problem.

“So write him back.” Her eyes were on mine. “Sometimes life is obvious.”

“Maybe.”

It was close to noon when we finally left the diner, forty bucks lighter but, at least in my case, completely stuffed. I wouldn’t need to eat for three or four hours.

“I’m going back to the Thatcher,” Clara said. “I need to get a follow-up posted, maybe try to run down some interviews.”

“Plank?”

“I wish. Would you…”

“What?”

“I could get you into the Thatcher.”

I smiled. “Sit around while you hammer away at the keyboard? Sounds exciting.”

“The antiquarian map collection is quite good.”

“You know, I’d love to.” In Clara’s company I could watch grass grow and be happy. “But I’ve got some errands this afternoon, before a job tonight.”

“What’s that?”

I hesitated. I’d told her about Hayden, but Riverton was different—she didn’t need to be an accomplice to outright, no-gray-about-it, illegal activity.

“Running down a lead. I’ll let you know if it goes anywhere.”

“Okay.” She turned toward the steps of the athenaeum. “Stay safe.”

“Yeah, right.” I smiled. “You, too.”

Z
eke and I sat in the back of Hendrick’s car, which he’d driven into the city from his house in Westchester. Remarkably, he’d found a parking space exactly where he wanted, two blocks down Ninth Avenue from the Riverton Commodities office. It was dark, a little before eight, and the sidewalks were almost entirely empty. The district included office buildings and lunch restaurants and small businesses. The homeward commute cleared it out like a neutron bomb.

“You have the supplies?” Hendrick asked, from the front.

“Yeah.” Moonsuit, plasticuffs, utility clothes, and so forth. It had taken me hours, all the way to Newark and back, for most of the stuff. But out there you could pay cash and leave no trail.

We checked our kit.

“After I open the door,” said Hendrick, for the third time, “you wait at least
twenty
minutes. All understood?”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t be anywhere nearby when you go in. Not in my own car.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Zeke. “Silas is a professional.”

We pulled on unmarked, identical black ball caps, gray Dickies coveralls and light latex gloves in the color closest to skin I’d been able to find. I turned on a cellphone, connected to the other two on a conference call, and checked reception on the bluetooth earpieces. We then taped the phone’s switches to lock them on.

Tactical Comm Gear for Dummies.

“Right,” said Hendrick, and we all got out, slamming the doors simultaneously.

The office building’s security was good enough to keep out panhandlers, ex-employees and the occasional midday con artist. But we weren’t in the diamond district, say, or on Fifth Avenue, where determined burglary gangs were a likely threat.

At the head of the alley behind the building, I indicated landmarks in a whisper. Then Zeke shot out the neighboring wall’s camera with a pellet gun. It was accurate enough at twenty yards, and far better than any kind of real weapon, legality-wise. Those mandatory minimums for possession are a genuine deterrent.

See? Gun control works.

Of course, I had my Sig Sauer, but that’s because I’m a nonconformist thrill seeker.

The metal utility door into Riverton’s building barely slowed Hendrick down. He scanned for alarms, double-checking my assertion that there weren’t any. Most management companies wouldn’t bother—too much expense, and individual tenants generally bought their own security systems—and this building was no exception. Satisfied after about ten seconds, Hendrick slipped his tools into the Sargent keyway, raked it, and pulled the door open faster than someone using a key might have managed.

“Nice,” I mouthed at him, soundlessly, and he waved me in.

Zeke disappeared back to the head of the alley, to keep an eye on both front and back entrances.

“Go,” he said, his voice clipped, coming through the earpiece.

“Right.”

The emergency stairs were quiet, the air still and stale inside the closed stairwell. At the sixth floor Hendrick studied the heavy metal fire door for a moment, then simply slipped the latch with a strip of flat spring steel. He held it while I eased the door open, just enough to peer through the crack. The hallway was empty.

I gave a thumbs-up, but followed that with one finger raised:
wait a moment.
Hendrick stood patiently while I unrolled the disposable Tyvek bunny suit from its plastic pouch and pulled it on. Elastic held the cuffs down over the latex gloves, and I tightened the hood drawstring enough to pull it around my cap. The thing was designed to OSHA hazmat standards, nice and snug.

The plan was that no one would ever know I’d been inside the Riverton suite. Nothing stolen, everything put back and, to all appearances, undisturbed. Like the emperor’s ninja, I would vanish unseen. I needed information—not a posse saddling up. Still, if something went wrong, and some painstaking forensic team went through afterward, I didn’t want them sweeping up my DNA.

Running into someone unexpectedly in the hallway was a chance we’d take, but a small one. The building appeared deserted, and I’d only be in public areas for a minute or two.

Hendrick pulled the door open, then closed it silently behind us. He wasn’t going in, so he didn’t need the protective gear.

The Riverton Commodities door was halfway down the hall. Hendrick bent to examine the buffed keypad for a long moment, then knelt and put his head all the way down to the floor, peering at the door’s base.

“Are you ready?” he whispered.

“Yup.”

“I will bypass the alarm first, then open the door. I think tape will hold the latch fine. Then I leave. Where will you wait?”

“In the stairwell.”

“Please remember, twenty minutes.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die.”

He gave me a funny look. Dutch schoolchildren must not use that expression.

“I mean, I pinky-swear.”

Hendrick just shook his head. He took a coat hanger from under his jacket—yes, a regular, laundry-service wire hanger. Same reason as Zeke carried a BB gun instead of a real weapon. He untwisted it and bent the wire into a big L.

“Okay,” he muttered, then punched a four-digit code into the keypad. The lock clicked.

I didn’t even have time to be impressed by the speed before Hendrick had knelt again and fished the coat hanger under the door. An instant later he reached up, turned the knob—

—and stood up, like a satisfied butler, gesturing with a sweep of his arm and a small bow.

“That’s
it
?” For what I was paying him, it should have taken longer than a few fucking
seconds.

“They never reset the administration password,” he whispered. “And when the motion detector saw movement inside, it thought someone was exiting, so it unlocked the door automatically.”

“If it’s that easy, I’ll do it myself next time.”

“Sure.” He shrugged, then cut a strip of metal tape from a small roll and placed it over the latch. “Go ahead and try.”

Back inside the fire stairs Hendrick clapped me once on the shoulder and started to walk down.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Twenty minutes, don’t forget.” And he was gone.

I stood and waited, beginning to sweat inside the plastic suit.

Ninety-five seconds later Zeke’s voice came through the earpiece.

“He’s gone.”

“All the way?”

“Saw the car drive off.” A pause, then, “All clear otherwise.”

“Good.” I checked my gloves one last time. “Fuck the twenty minutes, I’m going in.”

“Fine.” Unsurprised.

I went back down the hallway. In the building’s dense, after-hours silence, my Tyvek rustling seemed painfully loud. At Riverton’s door, I didn’t stop—just pushed it open, and stepped through.

Assuming Hendrick’s analysis of the security system was accurate, all I had to do was find the camera’s controller, almost certainly in the equipment closet I’d seen during my reconnaissance visit, and turn it off. He’d given me a USB stick, preloaded with Russian cracking software, that would go to work automatically. Kind of like a pick gun for a PC. I didn’t mean what I said before—the guy was a genius.

I felt like whistling as I headed into the executive suite. This was going to be a walk in the park. I could just feel it.

“Good God! Who the hell are you? What’s going on?!” Frank Riverton jumped up, yelled and scrabbled for his console phone all at the same time. Papers went flying. Somehow he knocked his laptop off the desk, and it crashed to the gleaming hardwood floor.

So much for all that stealth ninja shit. I should have just kicked the door in.

Of course my Sig was
inside
the zippered moon suit. I jumped over to the desk and grabbed the phone out of his hands, yanking the cord so hard it broke.