The Case Officer (28 page)

That was a question he had still
not fully resolved in his mind, despite the fact that he was sitting there now,
watching the street, making sure there was no unannounced return of François
and his passengers, nor any other eventuality that might interfere with their
plans. Even as he mentally walked through the upcoming op, a part of his brain
kept returning to the repercussions that would unquestionably ensue should the
mission fail.

He took a deep breath, let it out,
and said to his friend, “Let’s go.”

T
hey crossed the street, entered
Collette’s building and climbed the steep stairs to the fifth floor. They both
carried suitcases, and despite the fact that they were both in top physical
shape, both men were winded before they reached the fifth floor. But they
didn’t dare stop and rest; they wanted themselves and the telltale suitcases
out of sight as fast as possible, so no neighbor could see and start asking
questions, or possibly tell Collette later on.

The key worked flawlessly this
time – Culler had buffed it down back at the station – and when at last they
were inside the apartment, they set down their heavy suitcases as lightly as possible,
despite their great relief at being unburdened. They didn’t want to tip off the
downstairs neighbors that anyone was up there. Suppose the people downstairs
were aware that Collette and her mother were away for the weekend and knew the
apartment ought to be empty?

Mac fanned the front of his shirt
away from his body, trying to stir up a breeze against his sweaty skin. The
windows were open a crack, enough to let some air in but not enough to let in
the rain should a downpour occur, and Mac didn’t dare open them wider for fear
that someone might notice. Culler wiped his forehead with the back of his left
hand. They paused and listened a moment to be sure they didn’t hear anyone in
the hall outside. They didn’t. All they heard was silence and the normal street
noises from outside the room.

And they were nearly silent
themselves. They kept their verbal communication to a minimum, had removed
their shoes, used hand signals and gestures to communicate much of what they
had to, and kept their voices to a whisper when they did need to speak. Once,
when Culler had to sneeze, he stifled the impulse and sniffled instead. There
was no one positioned outside this time to warn them if someone should enter
the building. Having been through this once before, they worked together
swiftly as a team, photographing the wall and room, carefully moving the
furniture away from the wall, spreading out the drop-cloth, opening suitcases,
and assembling their equipment.

Santos turned on a portable
receiver and donned a set of earphones to listen to the target room on the
other side of the wall. It was Saturday morning, and they expected Huang’s
office to be empty, but he wanted to be absolutely certain. This sort of
caution was unnecessary during the first operation because only a pinhole would
silently penetrate the target. Now things would be different—very, very
different. An occupant of the target office would surely notice a two-inch core
drill breaking into the room behind the safe, and they wanted to avoid such
discovery at all costs. Santos listened quietly for several minutes.

He could hear what appeared to be
the hum of intrusion-sensing equipment in the office, and street noises;
nothing more. He knew the intrusion devices—sonar equipment that detects
movement in the room, and sends an alarm if there is any—would not be sensitive
enough to detect the slight movement they would cause behind the safe. And the
fact that it was activated was a clear indication that the room was unoccupied.
He passed the earphones to Mac. “Sounds empty to me,” Culler observed,
returning to other tasks.

While Mac continued to intently
monitor the target room, the tech carefully examined the wallpaper above the
baseboard that concealed their earlier audio installation. “I thought I wasn’t
going to have to mess with this crap.” If they were forced to restore the old
and faded wallpaper with a matching piece, it would require far too much time
and resources.

He found a seam and traced it
upward with his fingers. Then he moved to the right and found another about two
feet away and traced that as well. “I think we may be able to steam the paper
and roll it up about four feet on the wall. That way we won’t have to cut it,
and we should still have enough room to cut our hole. What do you think, Mac?”

“Where do you think the safe is?”

“Shit, I don’t know. But it’s
sitting right over our pinhole, right? So it could be centered on our hole, or
to the right or to the left. We won’t know for sure until we drill a few
holes.”

“So let’s just start from a spot
directly over our pinhole and work out both ways until we see the edge of the
safe. It’s up to you…”

“I just hope I don’t have to
steam too much of this goddamn wallpaper loose.” Culler picked up his steamer,
unscrewed the attached jar, and motioned to Mac to fill it with water from the
kitchen. When Mac returned, he reassembled the steamer and began loosening the
wallpaper from the bottom where it met the baseboard. Mac grabbed both ends of
a strip and carefully pulled upward, while Culler directed the steam.

     Bit by bit they worked the
wallpaper loose, Mac easing more and more of it out of the way, exposing the
painted surface that lay below, Culler directing the steam, till finally they
had almost four feet of wallpaper taped above them. Mac continued to monitor
the target through the earphones, but still he heard only silence except for the
low hum of the intrusion sensor.

With the painted plaster wall
exposed, Culler set the steamer aside and fitted three ten-inch sections of
two-inch core bits onto his “moon” drill. He knew the thickness of the wall was
slightly under 30 inches, so each core would cut all the way through to the
other side and stop just short of the safe. There was no need to use the back
scatter thickness gauge. He positioned the bit a few inches over the baseboard,
just above the original pinhole. He looked over at Mac one last time for
assurance that the room was still empty. After receiving a confirming nod, Santos
hit the trigger.

It took all of six seconds for
him to push the drill all the way through the wall. Santos felt the bit break
through into the room beyond, and his stomach did a turn. All of a technician’s
training taught him that breaking through a wall was the absolute worst thing
that could happen, and now he was doing it on purpose. Crazy...

He extracted the drill, and a
perfect two-inch by 30-inch concrete cylinder slid easily from the bit onto the
drop-cloth.

Mac listened with new intensity
for another minute or two. Then, confident that the room was still empty, they
examined the hole with a flashlight.

The dark gray rear of the steel
safe was clearly visible about an inch away from the end of their hole.

Santos drilled three more
overlapping two-inch concentric circles to the left of the original hole before
he could see the edge of the safe within the room. He moved back to the right
one circle and used a mason’s level to draw a plumb line two feet up from the
center of the hole. Then he continued drilling overlapping two-inch holes up
the line.

The pile of two-inch by
thirty-inch concrete cores continued to grow. Santos stacked the cores like
cordwood on the drop-cloth beside him. He worked as silently as possible and as
swiftly as he could. The sooner they accomplished their mission, the sooner any
jeopardy would be behind them. Discovery was unthinkable...

Santos remained focused on his
work, while Mac continued to monitor the audio from the next building to insure
that he heard no indications that anyone had entered.

An hour later, the drilling was
complete. The beehive-like concentric circles outlined a heavy concrete block
within—actually two blocks loosely joined together that formed the walls of
each building. Mac and Culler carefully slid out the two-feet-high by
sixteen-inches-wide by thirty-inches-thick center block and laid it neatly
beside the stacked cores on the drop-cloth.

By now they were both sweating
profusely. Santos’s shirt clung to his muscular torso, thoroughly drenched,
wrinkled, and limp. MacMurphy was not in much better shape. Sitting cross-legged
on the drop-cloth, they stared at the back of the safe through the gaping hole
in the wall. “There it is,” said Culler, matter-of-factly, wiping the sweat
from his face with a cloth.

“Jumpin’ Jesus Christ on a
crutch,” said Mac, his voice emphatic though his tones remained low. Santos
chuckled at Mac’s choice of Marine Corps verbiage.

 “Now to the fun stuff,” declared
Culler. He asked Mac to fetch a pan of water, while he removed the 30-inch bit
from the drill and replaced it with a shorter, six-inch bit of the same
two-inch diameter. He leaned through the hole in the wall and set the drill
against the back wall of the safe as high up as he could reach and squeezed the
trigger.

     The drill sliced through the
hardened steel with a low screech. Moments later Culler dropped a sizzling-hot
one-inch thick steel core into the water. The interior of the safe was
revealed, and the stacked money was clearly visible through the two-inch
diameter hole.

“There it is,” said Mac.

“Yep, now for the rest of it.” Culler
proceeded to drill concentric holes down in a line, revealing more stacks of
money. Mac checked his watch but reined himself in from displaying any signs of
his impatience. When Santos identified where the shelves were located (there
were three), he proceed to widen the holes at each level to allow enough room
for the stacks of bills to be pulled through. He calculated. He
eyeball-measured. He focused. And he tried to ignore the growing ache
throughout his arms and shoulders.

He worked more rapidly now. The
awkward effort of drilling while his arm and shoulder were wedged into the hole
in the wall fatigued him. He massaged his biceps and shoulder muscles between
each effort, though he could not rest. He was just as aware as Mac was of the
need to get finished and get out as swiftly as possible. This whole op—this
whole
unauthorized
op—would be worse than failure if they were to be
discovered.

At one point a noise that was not
coming from the drill gave Mac a start. Santos, concentrating on the drilling, didn’t
hear it. Mac did, though he didn’t know what it was. It sounded like it was
coming from inside Collette’s apartment! Had she returned? Was someone else
there? Impossible…

Mac tapped Santos on the back to
signal him to stop. Mac looked around the room, went over to the window, and
saw a sparrow perched on the sill outside. The bird had evidently landed and
pecked against the pane. Much relieved, he signaled Culler to resume his
drilling.

Finally there were three
approximately eight-inch-diameter holes in the rear of the safe connected by a
slash of two-inch holes down the middle. Santos set the drill down and mopped
the sweat from his face, neck, and arms.

“Move out of there,” said Mac.
“I’ll take it from here.”

Mac pulled a green army duffel
bag from one of the suitcases and set it on the floor next to the concrete
block and stack of cores. Then he reached through the hole into the back of the
safe and began extracting packs of 500 Euro notes and handing them back to
Culler, who in turn stacked them in the duffel bag.

Mac was forced to reach deep into
the safe to retrieve some of the stacks of Euros. As he stretched, moved
around, and grabbed, the jagged edges of the beehive hole dug into his ribs,
lacerating his skin. He winced but continued with his task. He hoped he wasn’t
bleeding on the wall, but the replaced wallpaper would cover it if he did. This
was no time for medical inspections. His problem was compounded when he had to
unload the bottom shelf of the safe, which was two feet below the bottom of
their hole due to the juxtaposition of the two buildings. “Why didn’t you make
this damn hole wider?!” he complained.

“The wallpaper, my friend...
Remember the wallpaper? You’ve got enough room. Quit complaining and, you know,
keep the money coming. I’m beginning to enjoy this.”

“You’re not having your skin
removed inch by bloody inch!” Mac groused, feeling the warmth of trickling
blood over his ribcage on his right side.

“Just keep passing me more
money,” replied an unsympathetic, triumphant Culler Santos.

The packs of Euros filled the
army duffel bag.

The two men stood back for a
moment to take a breath and admire their work. Mac fastened the top of the
duffel bag and turned to Culler. “What now?”

“Now we restore the mess we
made,” said Culler. “There’s not much we can do about the inside; not that we
care much, I suppose. They’ll get one hell of a shock the first time they open
that safe. But we’ve got to make this side look like before.”

“Right,” said Mac. “We don’t want
the ladies running to the police over this. The Chinese aren’t likely to
advertise the fact that they have been robbed of black money they brought into
the country.”

“Not likely, not likely,”
repeated Culler. He surveyed the restoration job ahead. “Give me a hand here,
will you? First pass me a few of those cores.”