We signed off with Green and Lane, and back at the hotel, LuEllen started making phone calls to numbers she’d memorized. She was looking for some specific gear, and she needed a nearby supplier. She got the right guy just before midnight, talked to him for five minutes, and dropped the phone back on the hook.
“Find it?” I asked.
“Yeah. We have a slight change of plans. We’re not going in quietly; we’re gonna go in superhard. We’re gonna go after his safe.”
“He’d probably suspect something . . .”
“Maybe. But maybe not . . .”
She told me about it as she changed clothes, into black jeans and a black jacket. “I gotta have that piece-of-shit car.”
“Where’re you going?”
“Out of town,” she said. “One of my friends.”
“When’ll you be back?”
“Really late, or early tomorrow morning,” she said. “Actually, there’s no reason for you not to know. I’m driving to Shreveport.”
“I could take you.”
“Nah. Better if I go alone. This guy is okay, most of the time, but he’s nervous.”
“Most of the time?”
“You know. As long as he’s on his meds . . .”
17
That night I stayed in LuEllen’s room, and spent twenty-seven bucks on pay TV, waiting, unable to sleep before LuEllen returned. She knows lots of people who do bad business, and not all of them are her friends, and not all of the places she goes to are good places for women to be after dark. That’s not sexism: it’s the simple reality of the redneck ghettos where she buys her tools.
When I wasn’t watching movies, I worked over the architect’s drawings, following every wire and line through the building, and everything that went outside. Two of the lines were particularly troublesome: one may have been—probably was—a camera that scanned the inside of the parking garage. No way to tell where it pointed, or whether it was live video only, or if it spooled onto a continuous tape. Another line ended in several vertically stacked switches in the service-elevator shaft, and I thought they almost surely were floor indicators going out to the elevator. If they were something else, like infrared motion detectors, we would have an even bigger problem. LuEllen had night glasses in her scouting bag, along with her cameras, and once we were inside the elevator shaft, could use the glasses to check for security devices.
And we would be in the shaft, going up the cables with climbing gear. It’s easier than it sounds, with good gear. The only alternative, with a keyed elevator, was to steal a key, or wreck the elevator getting to the wiring behind the key. That would take time, make noise, and tip anyone who decided to use the elevator after we did. Climbing was easy, and out of sight.
LuEllen was gone for a bit over seven hours; I was at the door when she came in. She was carrying a hand duffel, the same kind I packed for an extended fishing trip. She dumped it on the floor and it clanked.
“Sounds like construction equipment,” I said.
“Deconstruction equipment,” she said. “There better be something in that safe. This stuff isn’t cheap.” She was very sharp, each word clearly defined, coming out rapid fire. She was eager, hot, ready-to-go, bright-eyed and . . .
“Ah, man. You got your nose in it, didn’t you?”
“Just a little bit. And a little bit for tomorrow. Today.”
“Goddamn it.” I turned away.
“Hey . . .”
All right; I let it go, like I always did. LuEllen did a little cocaine from time to time—and, from time to time, more than a little. I hated the shit. I might smoke some weed after a long day on the water. I might even do a tab of amphetamine if there were enough reason. But cocaine, heroin, crystal meth . . . that crap will kill you. And if the dope doesn’t, the dealers will.
We stayed in bed well past noon. LuEllen had been bouncing around all night, the residuals from the cocaine. Later in the day, she’d be sleepy. At two in the afternoon, I was up, feeling groggy, looked out the window. Another great blue-sky day. I cleaned up, and as I got out of the shower, LuEllen was finally crawling out of bed.
“You okay?” I asked.
“No.” Still coming down.
“Go stand in the shower.”
“Yeah.”
When she got out, still a little groggy, I put her in the car, along with the equipment, and we went out for food. She began to revive, and we drove to Corbeil’s place and sat across the street watching the reception area. The reception area, as shown on LuEllen’s movies, had a single guard monitor.
“Look at this,” she said. “You see where the guy is standing?” We were two hundred yards away, but I could see him through the glass of the reception center.
“Yeah?”
“The monitor is just to his left. Now watch.” She took a cell phone from her pocket and dialed a number. The guard straightened, took a couple of steps to his right, picked up the phone.
LuEllen said into the phone, “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?” And clicked off.
The guy behind the glass shook his head, put the phone down, and went back to where he’d been standing before. He might’ve been reading something.
“So . . .”
“So when he’s answering the phone, he can’t see the monitor,” she said. “If the monitor is rotating between sites, there’s a good chance that we wouldn’t be on it, anyway.”
“Take us ten seconds to walk inside and get to the freight elevator,” I said.
“Mmm.”
“But we won’t know whether they’ve seen us or not.”
“That’s the fun part,” she said. “The waiting.”
When we left Corbeil’s, we drove up to the Radisson, and LuEllen and Green spent time hitting golf balls on the driving range, while I went over the drawings again. Lane, looking over my shoulder, chewing on a raw carrot, suggested that one particular group of rooms in the Corbeil apartment could be for a live-in maid. It was labeled “guest suite,” but it could have been either. We debated it for a while, and I finally pulled up the wiring diagrams. We decided that the questionable area had no wiring for a stove or for an electric clothes dryer, so it was probably a guest room.
“We’ll have to call,” I said. “Every fifteen minutes.”
We started calling right after dark. The phone would ring four times and we’d get Corbeil’s answering service. I was getting cranked on adrenaline, and LuEllen took a walk around the closed-down driving range and did a little cocaine. At ten o’clock, we left, LuEllen and me in one car, Green and Lane in the other.
I dropped LuEllen on the corner where we crossed the fence, and she was gone in an instant. I took the car around the block, parked, and crossed the fence myself five minutes later. LuEllen was waiting. We’d wrapped all of her tools in towels, and we were decently quiet as we moved slowly through the trees toward Corbeil’s apartment. Halfway there, we stopped for a radio check with Green:
“Got us?”
“Gotcha.”
We started moving again. There’s a technique to the movement—hunters call it “still hunting,” and it takes some discipline. LuEllen and I learned it, separately, as a method of staying out of jail. You take three slow steps and stop, and listen. Then five more, and stop. You cover ground more quickly than you’d think, and quietly, and almost always hear other people before they hear you.
We took fifteen minutes crossing to Corbeil’s, and it was all worth it, for our own self-confidence. If we were caught with LuEllen’s black bag, there’d be no point in explanations.
At the edge of the golf course, we stopped under cover of a low twisted pine, and listened. In twenty minutes, we heard nothing, nor did we see anything move. Corbeil’s apartment was dark, except for the IR glow through the night glasses.
“Gonna do it,” I said.
“Got the reel.”
She had an old Penn level-wind reel filled with fishing line. We’d attached a piece of a black 3.5-inch computer floppy disk to
the end of the line, as though we were going to cast it.
What I was going to do was easy enough, but I would be out in the open: a risk. After checking around one last time, I stepped out of the landscape planting and walked up to the garage door, towing the line behind me.
Six inches from the garage door, a small electric eye looked across at its illuminator on the other side of the driveway. I taped the floppy to the edge of the metal case around the illuminator, so it was hinged, and could fall up or down. Then I walked along the side of the building into the back, as though I were heading for the golf course. A minute later, I sprawled out next to LuEllen.
Normally, a driver would pull up to the door inside the garage, and tap his radio-operated garage-door opener to send the door up. Electric eyes both inside and outside the door would make sure that the door would not come down on top of the car, should it stop for some reason. As long as the electric eye’s illuminator was blocked, the door would stay up. The normal up-and-down cycle would not give us enough time to get inside, without taking the risk of being seen by the driver of the departing car. With the electric eye blocked, however, the door would simply stay up until we cleared it.
We couldn’t just cover the eye, though, because if a car came from the outside, and the eye was blocked, the door wouldn’t come back down—and whoever had just driven into the garage would probably notice that. So we needed the hinged cover.
All of that was easy enough: we’d both done something like it in the past. But the wait was a killer. During the week, when we were scouting the place, a car might come out or go in every fifteen minutes or so. The longest we’d had to wait was a half hour. This time, we had to wait for forty-five minutes, but we lucked out. When the door finally went up, the car was inside the garage, heading out.
I put the radio to my mouth, and said, “Up yours.”
Green came back: “Sounds good to me.”
I pulled the straps for LuEllen’s black bag over my back, and got to my knees. The brown Town Car cleared the garage and started around the approach drive, the door still up. As it began to exit, LuEllen pushed the speed-dial button on her cell phone. When the car disappeared, LuEllen whispered, “Go.”
We went. As we crossed the drive, she said into the phone, “George? Is this George?” Then, “Don’t tell me this is a wrong number, buster . . .”
The guard at the reception center, on the other end, eventually hung up, but by that time we’d walked thirty feet across the garage and were sheltered behind a concrete pillar at the freight elevator. The elevator doors were shut, but opened when we pushed the call button. A roof light came on, and I reached up and covered it with the black bag until LuEllen got the doors closed.
“Hatch,” she whispered.
I made a hand stirrup, as I had for Lane back in Jack’s house, and LuEllen stood up in it and pushed the elevator hatch askew. LuEllen peered up the elevator shaft with the night glasses. Looking for an infrared motion detector or anything else that might trip us up.
“We’re clear,” she whispered, and pushed the hatch up out of the way. I boosted her through, handed her the bag, and followed behind. Using the light of two needle-flashes, we put our Jumar climbers on the cable, replaced the hatch, and started up in the dark.
A five-minute climb, eight floors. Hanging off the elevator door at Corbeil’s floor, LuEllen first took the stethoscope out of her pocket, and listened. Nothing. Then she dialed the next number on her speed dial—Corbeil’s apartment. Again, no answer. She patted me on the shoulder. I had her mechanical door-openers ready. I forced the jaws between the doors, and we pried the doors open. LuEllen did a quick peek with a mirror, then clambered into the hallway. I was five seconds behind her, with the bag.
The hallway was arranged like many rich people’s hallways—so that the rich people would encounter each other as seldom as possible. A vestibule at the main elevator branched into two hallways, one for Corbeil’s apartment, one for the other apartment that shared this entry floor.
Both hallways made a sharp turn just off the vestibule. When we crawled out of the service elevator shaft, we were already on Corbeil’s side of the floor, but too far down the hall, past his door.
We went back to his door and LuEllen took the jaws from me and forced them between the door and the steel doorjamb. Then she attached a steel wheel, like a small steering wheel, to a square screw-end at the top of the jaws, and moved behind me so I could turn it. The mechanical advantage was huge: the big wheel must have spun five or six times for every quarter-inch that the jaws opened, but nothing could stand against them. Slowly, slowly, the door moved; then suddenly, popped.
LuEllen had moved around so that she was below me, facing the door, a heavy utility knife in her hand. When the door popped, she shot inside, making for the closet where we thought the alarm console was fixed. As she did that, I began uncoiling 150 feet of climber’s rope from the black bag.
As I did it, I was counting to myself. Some of the alarm systems give you as much as two minutes to punch your code into the key pad. Some of them give you less. As soon as she’d gone into the apartment, the keypad began a slow beeping. Then she was into the closet. I stepped in behind her and pushed the door shut.
Twenty seconds. I could hear a scuffling sound, a ripping sound, then quiet, except for the beep-beep-beep-beep and then beeeeeeeeeeeeee. Thirty seconds. The pad was dialing out. Damnit. The shortest possible delay. LuEllen appeared in the doorway, black-on-gray. “We’re good,” she said, in an almost normal voice.
“I’ll rig the line,” I said. I was drenched with sweat: I did industrial espionage, and went places where I wasn’t wanted, but the big-time apartment break-in wasn’t my style.
“Look at the rug,” she said.
I looked down, in the light of her flash: we were leaving greasy tracks behind us. “Uh-oh.” I stepped to the door and looked out in the hall. The tracks came all the way down the hall from the elevator, though they were harder to see in the subdued hall lighting. “Let’s get the line rigged. We’ll just have to take a chance that nobody’ll see them.”
Another unforeseen risk.
We did a quick run through the apartment to make sure it was empty. On the way, I stopped for a few seconds to admire LuEllen’s work with the alarm. She’d used the knife to cut a hole through the drywall to expose the alarm console—couldn’t just pull the wires out, because if you cut a wire, the security service would be automatically alerted. She’d then stripped the wire, clipped in bypasses, and then cut the wire between the two bypasses. The top bypass silenced the keypad; the bottom one would keep the circuit alive, so the cut-wire call-out would never be made. She’d done it in about twenty-five seconds.
The suite that had worried us, the possible maid’s suite, was just a guest room. The computer was in a small purpose-built office. “Don’t stop,” I said. “Just walk on by.”
The balcony ran the width of the apartment. We took a moment, surveying an adjoining balcony with the night-vision glasses, then carefully opened the door and listened. I could hear what sounded like a radio or CD, but it was inside, contained. Above us, I thought. We looped the climbing rope around one of the support posts on the balcony, and coiled the rope so that a quick kick would launch it down the side of the building. If somebody came through the door, we could be on the ground in less than a minute, pulling the rope after us.
That done, we headed for the safe, which was nicely concealed behind a piece of wooden paneling. LuEllen said, “I’ll do this, you get going.”
I walked back and forth and around the room, leaving traces of the black grease, while LuEllen started pulling out her equipment. After leaving the tracks, I went back to the door, took off my pants, jacket, shoes, and the dirty kitchen gloves, and walked back to Corbeil’s office in my shorts and socks.
LuEllen made a lot less noise than I’d feared. She was good at this, and what she was doing was more a cover than any serious attempt at the safe. As long as Corbei
l concentrated on the safe, and not the computer, we’d be cool.
In his office, I shut the door and turned on the light. What I was doing was simple: I was loading a program that would spool anything he typed on the computer to a file on his hard drive. Another program—one of my own design—would send the file to one of my online mailboxes, and then erase its tracks. The only question was, had Corbeil booby-trapped his computer with hardware of some kind, or software, to detect intrusion?
I spent twenty minutes trying to figure that out, and in the end, didn’t. I didn’t think so, but you can’t be sure, not in twenty minutes.
As soon as my software was in, I checked the rest of the desk, found a couple of Zip disks, and copied them to my own Zip disks.
I was just finishing when LuEllen scratched on the door. I turned out the light and opened it: “Almost done,” I said.
“I need your help. Hurry, and get dressed.”
In the study, LuEllen had done two things: she had taken her heavy bar, which had an edge like a razor, and had cut through the wall around the cylindrical safe. The safe was set in concrete, inside a steel frame that was probably bolted to the building beams. Around the cylinder flange, she’d fitted a five-sided, one-size-fits-all steel collar, with adjustable bolts.
With that in place, she’d gone to the far wall and cut another hole, exposing one of the I-beams that held up the building. The beams had been covered with drywall, so exposing them was no problem. She’d slipped a steel strap around the beam, then hooked the strap to the collar on the safe, using what amounted to a large come-along.
The come-along was essentially a high-ratio pulley, with a four-foot-long handle and a three-foot pipe as an extension; the connection was a steel cable. She’d pumped the cable tight; so tight that I could have walked on it without bending it at all.
“The thing is, the safe is starting to move,” she said. “The concrete is cracking up. I can hear it, but I’ve got so much pressure on it, that when it breaks free, it’s liable to come flying out of the hole.”