Masked (2010) (14 page)

“Well, I’ll talk to Gallo,” I said, grudgingly. “No harm in that, anyway.”

Sure. No harm at all. God likes a good laugh now and again, doesn’t he? That’s what irony is for.

Gallo was living all on his own in a rat’s-ass workman’s cottage just outside Luton—the only inhabited building on a condemned row that was short but not sweet. I mean, someone would have had to drop serious money on the place to bring it up to the point where you could describe it as a slum. Right then it was just four walls and—intermittently—a roof.

Gallo didn’t mind much. His needs were modest, and he enjoyed his own company. More to the point, he was scared shitless of anybody else’s. The Extra-Normal Affairs people were talking back in the day about giving him a pension to stay away from major population centers, but then the Tories got in again and the mood swung. They left Gallo to starve on his own time.

And that gave me my in, as it were. I pointed out to him that this job would set him up for the rest of his life. He could buy a place in the country, a thousand miles from anywhere. Buy a tent and live on top of a mountain in Tibet, or out in the Kalahari, I don’t know. Anywhere except the ragged edge of fucking Luton: even a dog deserves better than that.

Gallo shook his head slowly, clearly not liking the idea. “I don’t know, Davey,” he mumbled in that singsong way of his. “I mean I really don’t know. I’m doing all right here.”

I looked around his living room, staring in turn at the two cracked teacups, the sway-backed Formica table, the ancient portable TV zebra-striped on top with cigarette burns. I didn’t need to say anything: Gallo knew what I was thinking.

“But it’s all right for me,” he said, throwing out his arms in what was either a shrug or a plea. “I don’t miss anything very much. And at least—out here—I can’t hurt anyone. That’s the most important thing. There’s nothing much to upset me, but if I do get upset, then nobody gets hurt.” Both times he said the word
hurt
he lingered on it, almost making it into two syllables. I knew where he was coming
from, and I even agreed with him up to a point: there are two kinds of bad jobs, the screwups and the slaughterhouses. Worst kind of all is the kind that starts off as the one and slides into the other.

“Okay, Rizzo,” I allowed. “So you’re doing nobody any harm. But fuck, you’re not doing a damn bit of good to anyone, either. You’re barely living. You’ve got all that power stored up inside you, enough to bring a whole city to a standstill, and you’re living like a cockroach under a brick. You don’t think you deserve a little better, maybe? I mean, who dares wins, man. Specifically, who dares wins a ticket out of this shithole into a nicer shithole, with hot water and clean towels, and a well-stocked liquor cabinet.”

I mentioned that last point because Gallo used to put it away like a sailor on shore leave, and because despite being pathetically happy to see me he hadn’t offered me one of the three cans of lager staying semicool in a red plastic bucket full of water on the floor next to his chair: husbanding his resources, I figured.

Gallo rubbed the bridge of his nose, where he used to wear big bottle-glass spectacles before he gave up the unequal race against his birth defects. He made a noncommittal sound. “I thought you didn’t do this stuff anymore,” he hedged. “Since. . . you know. . . what happened to Kim.”

It was a low blow, in a way: Gallo breaking the established ground rules to fend me off. I don’t talk about my kid, and what happened to her when she lost control of her phasing powers. I’d even trained myself out of thinking about it. That turned out to be a dumb move, though: one time when I opened the wrong drawer and got hit by a photo of her, aged 9, blowing out her birthday candles, it took me a second even to remember who she was. I’d gotten that good at editing out my own memories, my own feelings. I’d cauterized Kim right out of my fucking mind.

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for bringing that up, Gallo. You’re right. I got out of the blagging habit for a while. Then I got back in again. What the hell, you know? It passes the time.” By which I meant it’s better than sitting at home with two bottles of whiskey and seeing how far you make it into the second one before you pass out.

“I don’t know,” Gallo said again.

“You don’t know what?” I demanded, a little testy now.

“Well, I might let you down, is one thing. I’m not. . . you know. . .” He shrugged again. “I can’t control it. When it happens, it happens. But I can’t
make
it happen.”

Part of me wanted to walk away from this, but the other part—the part that had swallowed Vessell’s line and was already figuring out how to spend all that money—was bigger and stronger and a whole lot more devious.

“Rizzo,” I said, “your powers kick in whenever you get upset or scared or nervous or even just surprised. I think I can guarantee that if you go into that bank next Tuesday, one or more or possibly all of those things is going to happen. You don’t need to do a thing except turn up. And the beauty of it is, even if they nail the rest of us you’re in the clear. Nobody will ever be able to prove you had a thing to do with it.”

Gallo seemed to like that part. “They won’t clock me for the inside man?” he asked, wanting to hear me say it again.

“No reason why they should,” I said. “Psi-screening is illegal in the EU, so the only people who can finger you are you and us. We’ll be in Jamaica, where extradition is just a bunch of sounds you can limbo to, and you’ll get a big, fat, freshly laundered check in the post three days later. Or more likely, the key to a safe deposit box in Switzerland where your share will be waiting for you to claim it whenever you want to.”

Gallo’s eyes misted up. He was thinking of colonnades of cheap beer, enchanted caverns of porn—his usual low-rent pursuits writ large and glorious. I felt like a shit pulling this number on him, but in my own defense I meant every word. I really didn’t have the slightest inkling of how things were going to go.

I had to hang around a while longer, but I didn’t really have to work at it anymore: Gallo was talking himself around now, without any help from me. I let him do it, shook his unpleasantly moist hand, and hit the road.

Three days to make it happen. Then the rest of my life to lie
back at my ease in some place where rain never falls, and tell the story to eager, admiring women with California tans and Garden of Eden wardrobes.

Three days wasn’t long enough, as it turned out. As soon as he heard that Gallo was on board, Vessell got retrospectively serious about the reconnaissance. He decided he wanted to know which supernormal security firms DeJong’s had on retainer, as well as the shift rotas at New Scotland Yard. It was good to know who might be coming to the party, and how long it might take them to get there. He wanted to leave as little as possible to chance—a sentiment I could very much get behind.

So we ended up switching the target date from Tuesday to Wednesday, which sounds like nothing much but actually contributed significantly to our downfall. Am I talking too fast for you, flatfoot? I said “contributed significantly”—the word you wrote there looks like it has at most six letters. I’m not signing a précis, you understand me?

The other change, which made a whole lot of sense in the context of Vessell’s master plan, was that we were going to do the job right in the middle of the day, rather than at night. That felt weird, I have to admit. As Lockjaw, I usually prefer to have my conversations with deadlocks, bolts, and security systems in the peace and quiet of 2:00 a.m., when you’re generally guaranteed a little privacy. This was going to be a different kind of operation, but I felt like I could handle it. We all felt like we could handle it.

Naseem went in at 10:00 a.m. She’d already opened an account the day before, and paid the first quarter’s rental on a safe deposit box. She went to the desk now and asked if she could get access to the box and drop off a few items. She held up a little lead-lined case that looked as though it might contain jewelry.

They took her down to the vault, where a superpowered security guard (it was Tom Tiptree—Telltale) scanned her for weapons or suspicious items, finding nothing at all. The little case was full of necklaces and trinkets: maybe a little cheap for this place, but what does a cop know about jewelry? They let her through. Tell
tale and another guard, the Iron Maiden, went in with her and stood at a discreet distance while she went to her safe deposit box and opened it.

There was nothing inside the safe deposit box except the documents Naseem had left there the day before. One of them was a legal-looking letter signed by one Peter H. Vessell.

There was a blinding flash and a whiff of ozone as Hyperlink—right on cue—zeroed in on his name and teleported in. He had a bulky rucksack on his back, and his hands were open in front of him as though he was making an offering: Tin and me were sitting on his right and left palms respectively, having been shrunk by Perspective an hour before to about half an inch in height. She restored us to normal size in front of the astonished faces of the guards, and I punched Telltale out before he’d even got done saying “What the fuck?” Tin had a harder time of it with Iron Maiden, who quite frankly outclassed him in the smarts department and fought like a gleaming, rust-free ninja. In the end he won on mass, ramping up the density of his metal body until his feet were sinking into the concrete when he moved and his punch was like a slap in the head from a wrecking ball. The Maiden went down with serious dents in her chassis.

We checked our watches. 10:07, which meant we were well within the margin of error. Vessell got to work, hauling out the other safe deposit boxes and piling them up in front of Naseem. She shrank them in batches of a dozen or so, turning each big, heavy steel container into a dinky little thing about the size of a thumbnail. Into her jewel case they went, in clattering handfuls.

Meanwhile I sweet-talked the door to the secondary vault, which Vessell’s sources said was full of bullion. My power is a little weird, if the truth be told: a little. . . well, analogue. Soft around the edges. I talk to locks, and they instinctively like and trust me. I can’t give them orders, but I can usually persuade them. A little bit of flattery goes a long way, and tone of voice is just as important as what I say.

It took me three minutes to coax the vault door to open. It was
a time lock, so it had a lot of inhibitions about opening up in the middle of the day, so far off the normal schedule. I reassured it that I’d still respect it in the morning, told it all the usual things a lock likes to hear about the quality of its build and the fine balance of its tumblers, and finally there was a slo-mo
click-cluck
sound as it opened up for me.

By this time, Naseem had finished with the deposit boxes. She zapped the bullion bags, of which there were fewer, and piled them in on top until the case was brimming. Then she miniaturized the contents by another fifty percent or so and piled in some more. Finally she closed the case, locked it, checked the seal—which had to be perfect—and gave us the nod.

“Okay,” Vessell said tersely. “Ten-fifteen. Let’s go.”

In a perfect world, of course, we could all have gone back the way we’d come, by means of Vessell’s Hyperlink powers. But there’s that half-hour downtime to factor in, and the near-certainty that we’d be followed all the way to Hell and back by whatever supergoons the bank and the Met put on our tails.

But the plan had allowed for all this.

I chatted up the main door of the vault and it sprung very readily: in my opinion, it had probably been sprung before. We stepped out and headed on up the stairs. There was another guard at the top, but he had a brute force power of some kind and Tin walked right over him just as he was starting to Hulk up.

A clatter from behind us made us all spin around, Tin already pulling back his fist for another juggernaut punch: but it was only Perspective. She’d tripped over a mop and bucket that were just lying there on the stairs, dropping the jewel case, which made a deafening clatter as it bounced back down two or three steps. She retrieved it, gave it a cursory check, and hurried back up to join us.

Wednesday. The cleaner was halfway through her shift, and she left that stuff right where she was going to need it again after her break. That was all it took. Funny, huh? How you can be dead and buried and still keep right on walking, not knowing you took the hit.

We walked into the bank proper, where the ultrarich citizenry were conducting their everyday transactions—taking out another million in small change to see them through the weekend, making a down payment on a Caribbean island, stuff like that.

“This is a robbery,” Vessell said commandingly. “Nobody move.”

A mother with two twin girls shrieked and clutched them to her bosom. A fat man gave a strangled sob of terror. An A-list celebrity forgot for a moment that this was real life and stepped out of line to confront us, then caught a warning glance from Tin and stepped right back again.

Of course, there were digital sound pickups all over the room that would respond immediately to the word
robbery
: also, despite the stern tone, we weren’t doing anything to stop the tellers from punching their panic buttons, so there were silent alarms going off all around us. Obligingly, we walked out into the center of the room, well away from the innocent bystanders. All except for Vessell. He went right up to the nearest line of people, unshipped his rucksack, and took a machine rifle out of it. It was, to be honest, the scariest thing I’d ever seen. It looked like it had been drawn by Rob Liefeld.