the Second Horseman (2006) (26 page)

Brandon slid the walkie-talkie from his pocket and pressed the button on its side while Catherine continued to creep forward through the traffic.

"Rob, can you hear me?"

He'd been checking in every hour with the truck driver, trying to make sure he was as calm as a man who thought he had an explosive locked to him could be.

"I can hear you."

"Hey, it's almost over. Before you know it you'll be sitting around with Oprah telling her your story. Okay. Here's the deal. You're going to do everything exactly like you normally do. We couldn't get the combination for the lock on the back of the real truck, though, so we jammed the one we put on your truck. If they ask you about it, just say you don't know what's wrong with it. No explanation -- you just want to get out of there and go home, right?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, then. I'll be listening in through the phone on your belt. I've also got people inside the Fed, so any hand signals or written notes are going to be a really bad idea for you."

All lies, of course. He had no one inside, and hadn't been able to figure out if the
Fed monitored radio and cell signals in the dock. Most likely, they didn't, but he couldn't take that chance.

"I understand."

"Rob. Is this your money?"

"No."

"Is anyone going to be hurt by me stealing it?"

"No."

"Okay, then. When you come back out, you're going to follow the chase cars. They're going to take you somewhere to get that plastique off you and they're going to get you some pizza and hold on to you until we can offload the real truck and get out of town. Probably twenty-four hours or so. I don't want you to worry about it. We haven't hurt anyone in this thing and there's a reason for that. If I get caught, I don't want to get nailed for murder and spend the rest of my life inside, right?"

"Right." Even over the marginal connection, he sounded skeptical.

"Good luck, Rob." One last look at the walkie-talkie and he switched it off. It was out of his hands now.

Catherine stepped on the clutch and began revving the engine in a way that made it sound like the truck was about to stall. They were about a hundred yards from the gate leading to the Fed docks -- close enough for him to make out two uniformed guards standing on the other side of the fence.

"Okay, slow it down," he said.

Catherine rode the clutch to a full stop and then used it to jerk the truck briefly forward a few times. It didn't take long for the horns to start and then for the traffic behind them to begin death-defying maneuvers to get around.

"I see it!" Catherine said. "Coming up behind us."

Brandon adjusted his side mirror slightly and watched the decoy truck slowly close on them. Catherine shut off the ignition for a moment, turned on the flashers, then started it up again, revving the engine wildly and lurching toward an empty bus stop a few feet from the dock gate.

"Watch your timing," Brandon cautioned.

"What do you think I'm doing?"

"Sorry. Keep your eyes on the road and I'll watch the decoy. It's thirty yards back."

She continued jerking forward as the traffic flowed around them, grinding gears and feathering the accelerator artistically.

"Twenty yards."

When they got to the bus stop, she pulled into it and stalled the motor. After a few futile-sounding attempts to get it started again, Brandon jumped out and crawled beneath the cab, pretending to search for the cause of their engine problems.

He wiggled along the asphalt, watching the wheels of the decoy truck as it rolled by and stopped in front of the Fed entrance. A moment later, the gate began to open and the truck pulled through.

"Car two passing by the Fed," he heard in his earpiece. "The truck has entered and we're starting around the block."

Brandon's heart was pounding a mile a minute -- just like it always did. Not at the possibility of being caught, which had never scared him for some reason, but at the thought that this thing might actually work.

"The truck's backed into the bay and stopped," Catherine said over his earpiece.

"This is car one. We've called in and confirmed delivery."

"Car two. We've called in delivery."

"Jesus," Brandon whispered to himself, scooting into a position where he could see through the bottom of the Fed's fence. The decoy truck was just visible sticking out of the center bay. He assumed that the driver was out of the cab unhooking the trailer but without an open line to him, that was only an educated guess. Just as likely, he was telling his story to Fed security and calling the cops. No sense in worrying about that now.

While this plan left more things to providence than he normally would have tolerated, it wasn't the worst thing he'd ever come up with. The idea was simple: If it was impossible to steal the money on the open road, you had no choice but to steal it at the Fed.

The GPS system used by the security company for monitoring the convoy wasn't sensitive enough to know the difference between sitting in the Fed's delivery dock and sitting twenty yards away in the bus stop, so their slightly outdated technology was telling them -- and the chase cars were confirming -- that the money had been delivered. The only thing going on that was even slightly out of the ordinary was the Budweiser truck broken down just outside the gate.

"This is car one. The helicopter has confirmed delivery."

"Yes!" Brandon said, a little too loudly. Only one more hurdle. Assuming the driver hadn't ratted them out, the Fed guys would be noticing that the lock on the trailer was jammed. When they got it off and found the truck full of the expected bags, they'd call in the final delivery confirmation.

He was surprised when he saw the trailerless decoy truck begin to roll out of the bay after only another minute. He'd figured on it taking a while to cut the lock off, but they must have had problems with it before and been prepared.

He dragged himself from beneath the truck, wincing at the excruciating ache coming from his injured shoulder. Catherine fired up the motor -- stalling it a few times before bringing it to a sickly purr.

He jumped in, keeping his eyes on the cab of the decoy truck as it disappeared around a corner.

"Oh, my God . . ." Catherine said in a low voice that was hard to hear over the engine.

"What?"

"You did it. You actually did it."

He smiled broadly. "Was there ever any doubt?"

"Yeah. There really was. Now can we get the hell out of here?"

He shook his head. "With all the confirmations in, the security company will be shutting down its tracking operation pretty fast -- they've been at it nonstop for over fifteen hours after all. But let's give 'em a few minutes to make dead sure no one's still watching."

She worked the accelerator to make th
e t
ruck seem as though it was still warming up and Brandon rubbed his hands together vigorously, smile ever widening.

"You're in a good mood," Catherine observed.

"Are you kidding? If I was a football player, I just won the Super Bowl. If there was a Nobel Prize for larceny, I'd be composing my speech right now. In fact, I'd be right at the part where I thank all my lackeys."

She didn't turn toward him, but her teeth flashed briefly in the sunlight. "I'm curious. Does this feel better than normal?"

"What do you mean?"

"You know, because you didn't do it for yourself. That you put yourself at risk for other people."

"I don't know. Are you going to let me roll naked in the money?"

"Maybe if we have time --"

"Before you shoot me?"

Her smile disappeared so suddenly, he wondered if it was ever there. "You still think I'd do that?"

Brandon turned in his seat and examined the side of her face. "You know, I really don't anymore. I actually think you'll be surprised when they do it. But then you'll just put it out of your mind and kee
p m
arching on like the good soldier you are."

"Time to go," he said, cutting her off.

She glared at him for a moment and then shoved the truck into gear, easing back out into traffic. "You're a hell of a clever guy, Brandon. But you're paranoid."

He nodded slowly. "You have no idea."

The way he let the sentence hang seemed to worry her. "Is that supposed to mean something?"

"I hope you believe me when I tell you that I wish it didn't have to be this way."

"You're starting to scare me, Brandon."

The concept he'd presented to her and Scanlon was that the security firm would just turn off the GPS monitors upon delivery confirmation and go home. After that there would be no record generated and so the truck would essentially be lost in space. They'd just drive to the warehouse he'd rented, turn on the signal jammers and unload the money at their leisure.

Of course, it wasn't really that simple.

"Remember what I told you about details, Catherine? It's all about the details."

"Oh, no," she said quietly. "Brandon, tell me you didn't screw us on this thing."

He shrugged. "Well, you do have a little problem."

She turned left along the route they'd laid out and found traffic light enough to allow her to speed up a bit. When she spoke again, her voice had gained in volume. "What problem?"

"Think about it, Cath. How long before the Fed guys realize that trailer is full of nickels, ones, and newspaper?"

"We figured about two hours."

He nodded. "And how long for us to unload?"

"About five hours to scan all the bags for GPS transmitters and load them into vans."

"So there are three hours that they know they've been ripped off and we're still digging around in the truck. What will they do with that overlap?"

"They'll try to track the GPS signals in the money bags. But we've set up the jammers in the warehouse so there's no way they can get a signal."

"And?"

"And what?"

He shook his head in disappointment. "I'm going to tell you the secret of planning great crimes, Cath. Are you listening?"

She watched him out of the corner of her eye, but her expression was unreadable.

"One word: perspective."

"Perspective," she repeated.

"Exactly. You come up with your plan and then put yourself in the shoes of everyone involved. An amateur will always run through things from the perspective of the criminal -- themselves. In your case, everything you see through the window of this truck. I, on the other hand, will run through the job a hundred times -- from your point of view, from the point of view of the cops, from the point of view of some guy walking by our broken-down truck on his way to Starbucks --"

"What the hell are you trying to say, Brandon? That you screwed me on this? That you sabotaged the job?" Her voice was nearly a shout now, despite the open windows and their proximity to about a thousand ears. "You don't care anything about those warheads or the people they could kill. You --"

He reached over and clamped a hand over her mouth. "So why don't you take a shot at answering my question again. When the security company people figure out they've been had and turn their monitors back on, they won't get a signal. What then?"

"What do you mean what then, you son of a bitch?" she said when he pulled hi
s h
and away. "I mean, if you were them, what woul
d y
ou assume?"

"That the signal was being jammed."

"Right. Thank you. And by then they'll probably have figured out that the Budweiser truck broken down next to the Fed had something to do with all this. What will they do with that information?"

Catherine was silent for a moment, turning the question over in her mind. "They'll calculate how far we could have gotten in the time we've been missing, then they'll call the phone companies, the trucking companies, and anyone else who uses satellite transmissions to find out where they're having signal problems."

"I knew you had it in you," Brandon said.

"How long have you known this?"

"I don't know. A few years?"

Her eyes narrowed dangerously. "Fine. What now?"

He shrugged. "The Bay Area is a signal transmission disaster -- what with all these mountains and valleys and buildings. All you need is a quiet natural dead spot to unload."

"And I suppose you know just the place."

"Coincidentally, I do."

"What do you want?"

"I want to survive."

"Paranoid," she repeated, bringing th
e t
ruck to a stop at a red light.

"Look, my job is done -- terrorists and warheads inhabit your world, not mine." He opened the door and slid out onto the street. "Keep heading toward the warehouse. In a little while, when I'm confident I'm not being followed, I'll give you a call and tell you how to get to a dead spot where you'll have all the time you need."