Dark Angel, page 19
They found a light switch and turned on the banks of fluorescent lights. The room, probably forty feet by forty feet, showed an island of cardboard boxes in the middle of the floor: ordinary large-sized moving boxes, sealed with transparent tape. An ill-used kitchen table sat to one side, with a pile of transparent 3M packaging tape on red spools, a couple of box cutters.
“Let’s see what we don’t want to do,” Letty said. She picked up a box cutter, wrestled one of the boxes off the nearest stack—it wasn’t especially heavy—and cut the taped top. The box was tightly packed with more, smaller boxes, also ordinary cardboard.
“What the hell?” Cartwright said.
Letty opened one of the smaller boxes and inside found even more boxes, dark blue plastic. “It’s like one of those nested Russian doll things.” She pulled one of the plastic boxes out and turned it over in her hands.
“Computer chips.” She looked at printing on the package. “Intel computer chips, it says . . . 5.5GHz i9-12900KS, whatever that means.”
“Think . . . Paul . . . would know?”
Letty shrugged. “I’ll call him. Find out.”
She did that and Baxter did know: “Holy shit. You say there’s a lot of them?”
“Yeah. If all the boxes are like the one I opened . . . maybe . . . thousands?”
“Wow. I mean, wow! Grab a few boxes. I’ll come get you.”
“What are they?”
“They’re Intel’s fastest chip. Right now, anyway. Maybe for the next year. I don’t think you can export them . . . I think, I don’t know, that the Russians wouldn’t be allowed to have them at all. Not yet, anyway.”
“You think they might be smuggling them?”
“Nowak might know the answer to that,” Baxter said. “I’d bet they were stolen, somehow. Look, you say there are thousands of them?”
“At least,” Letty said, looking around. “Really, there could be a million.”
“They’re worth six or seven hundred dollars each, more overseas. If there’s a million of them . . . that would be more than half a billion dollars on the open market.”
“Okay, probably not a million,” Letty said. “Give us five minutes, then come and get us.”
“Five minutes,” Baxter confirmed. “Bring some boxes.”
When Baxter had rung off, Cartwright asked: “What?”
“We gotta talk to Nowak,” Letty said. “I do want to take some of these boxes.”
From the floor, where the taped-up Hewitt was listening, he said, “You girls really don’t know what you’re messin’ with here.”
Letty said, “Yes, we do. Do you know what you’re messin’ with?”
“Some pretty mean guys . . .”
“Russian spies. They are going to cut your head off if you tell them that we were here, that we got past you,” Letty said. “They might cut it off just to keep your mouth shut, even if you don’t tell them.”
“You just gonna leave me on the floor?” Hewitt asked.
“No. Here’s what we’re gonna do, George,” Letty said. “We’re gonna take a few of these boxes with us. Then I’m going to cut one of your hands free, but not your feet or arms or legs. I’ll leave you the box cutter so you can cut yourself loose. That’ll give us time to get out of here. Then you better lock the door, get in that truck and get your ass out of California, as fast as you can. The guys you’re working with have killed a lot of people and you’d be nothing to them. They’d cut your head off for looking at them wrong. You got all that?”
Hewitt’s oversized Adam’s apple bobbed a few times, and he said, eventually, “Yeah. Yeah. Make sure you get my hand free. I’ll get the fuck out. I kinda knew . . . I’m just a security guard . . .”
Cartwright had stepped over to a gray metal box hung on a sidewall. It was locked, but she took a skeletal Leatherman out of her pocket, selected a tool, and broke the lock open. Inside was a mass of wires and a hard drive. On the inside of the cover was an instruction list on restarting the drive, and the name, address, and phone number for the security company.
Letty called Nowak and asked if she could kill the cameras and wipe the video, and Nowak said she could, but it might take a while.
“That’s fine. We won’t be out of here for ten or fifteen minutes.”
When Letty finished with Nowak, Cartwright was looking at the stacks of boxes. “How do you want to do this?”
“Take a few boxes at random, trying to keep the stacks looking about the same,” Letty said. “There must be a couple hundred boxes here. Maybe they won’t notice right away. And maybe they won’t all be the same chip, so we should take boxes from different areas . . .”
They could get six boxes in the short-bed pickup, under the cover, even with the drum set inside. They moved the boxes to the front door, and waited for Baxter, who showed up in exactly five minutes. While Baxter and Cartwright loaded the boxes, Letty cut one of Hewitt’s hands loose and put the box cutter on the floor twenty feet away, where he could roll over to it.
“George, I was serious about what I said,” Letty told him. “They’re gonna kill you. You gotta get out and hide from these fuckers.”
Hewitt nodded and said, “I’ll go.” And as Letty headed for the front door, he said, “You girls be careful. You’re too young for this shit.”
Letty got in the front passenger seat of the truck, and told Baxter, “Get as far away as you can, where we can still see the front door. I want to see if George actually gets out of here.”
They waited fifteen minutes, then Hewitt came out the door. Satisfied that he was alone, he loaded a half-dozen of the chip boxes into his truck, locked the warehouse door, jumped in the truck and took off.
Letty called their traffic-tracking number at the NSA and gave the man who answered the license plate number on the back of the truck, and its location. A minute later, the man said, “We got it.”
“Stay with it,” Letty said. “We want to know if he gets out of LA.”
Fifteen
Arseny Stepashin was sitting in his TV room watching a Golden State Warriors basketball game while his wife lay on a yoga mat behind the couch, doing crunches, grunting with each one.
When his cell phone rang, he couldn’t find it for a moment, then fished it out from the crack between seat cushions, looked at the caller’s name, and said, “Da?”
“Mr. Step—we maybe got a problem at the warehouse.” The caller was an American named Alan Greens; he knew very little Russian, but was reliable, because Step knew where Greens’s bodies were buried, the bodies being literal.
Step sighed and asked, “What’s the problem?”
“Well, when me’n Richard got here, George was gone. Door was locked, but his truck was gone and he was gone. We went inside and everything looked kinda okay except there was a bunch of 3M tape on the warehouse floor. I mean, like it was pulled off somebody. Like, there was arm hairs stuck in some of the tape.”
“What about the shipment?”
“I dunno. It don’t look right, but maybe . . . I dunno, maybe it’s okay,” Greens said. “There’s lots of boxes, Richard is counting them, but I don’t know how many there was supposed to be.”
“Let me go look,” Step said. “Hold on.”
Step lived in Beverly Hills—not in the Hills themselves, but down in the Flats—in a Spanish Revival house. The house was nice but wasn’t ostentatious by Beverly Hills standards and did have that 90210 zip code, which carried some weight back in Moscow.
He walked down a Mexican-tiled hallway to his home office, lit up his laptop, went to an encrypted file, typed in a fifteen-place password, and ran a finger down a spreadsheet. One hundred and eighty.
There should be one hundred and eighty boxes of advanced Intel chips stacked in the warehouse, ready to go on a South Korean ship that was actually a North Korean ship, but that was registered in Panama and legally owned by a Nigerian business family through a Cayman Islands front. Like the house, the ship was rented.
Step shut down the computer and walked back to the TV room, where his wife was frozen in a plank and was counting breaths, a breath equaling three seconds. She had fifteen percent body fat, which would be good for a gymnast, and she could hold a plank for five minutes. He picked up his phone and said, “Al? One hundred and eighty, exactly.”
He heard Greens say to Richard, “You sure? You better be sure. Okay, I’ll tell him.” Then, “Richard says one hundred and sixty-eight. Exactly. He counted twice.”
Step scratched his neck, looked at the ceiling, then asked, “You got enough space on your truck to load them up?”
“No. We took the small box truck and it’s full. We were dropping off, not picking up.”
“Okay. Call Yvgeny and tell him to get another truck over there, right now. Tell him right now. I want those boxes loaded and out of there in two hours. Tell him to put the truck somewhere secure, but leave the boxes on the truck. We’ll move them to the port tomorrow. Do not touch that 3M tape. Leave it right where it is, I want to look at it. We still got those bottles of Mr. Clean?”
“Sure, and a box of them paper rags. You want us to start wiping the place down?”
“Yes. Anything anyone might have touched.”
“You coming down here?”
“I’ll be there in an hour.” Step hung up and dialed a new number. When a man answered, he said, “This is me. I need you to get some of your people down to Long Beach. I need to know if anyone is watching the place. Be careful . . . Yeah, right now.”
Victoria Stepashin dropped out of her plank and asked, “Somebody fuck something up?”
“Somebody’s always fucking something up,” Step said. One hand went to his mouth and squeezed. “The security guard is gone and so are twelve boxes of those new Intel chips, the five-point-fives. There’s a question of whether he took off or was taken off.”
“Twelve boxes, that’s . . . one million, nine hundred and twenty thousand dollars delivered in Chongjin,” Victoria said, doing the math in her head. “If he took off with twelve boxes, you’re gonna have to cut his nuts off.”
“I will, if he took off. The way Alan’s talking . . . It might be something else.”
“Alan’s a moron.”
“Not about this,” Step said. “Not about counting boxes.”
“How many boxes are left?” Victoria asked.
“Richard says one hundred and sixty-eight.”
“Think the FBI might have grabbed them?”
Step shook his head. “Doesn’t seem like it. Why would the FBI take twelve boxes? They’d take them all and have a press conference.”
“They were all over us at Ventura . . .”
“Yeah. Something’s happening and we don’t know what it is.”
“Better find out,” Victoria said. “If there’s one hundred and sixty-eight boxes left, that’s still . . .” It took her five seconds . . . “twenty-six million, eight hundred and eighty thousand dollars.”
“I’m on it,” Step said. “I hope it’s not about the other thing.”
“Something to worry about,” Victoria agreed. “You start mixing political shit with money shit, there’s a good chance you’re gonna get dropped in the shit.”
The other thing was the train-hacker problem. They’d promised people in Moscow that they’d handle it. The people they’d promised tended to get cranky if promises were broken. They were the kind of people whose unhappiness tended to become your unhappiness, to say nothing of your screaming agony.
Step went out to the garage and rolled Victoria’s silver Mercedes SL550 down the driveway. Forty-five minutes later, he took a call. The man, whose name was Tom Boyadjian, said, “This is me. There’s nobody watching the place, not right now, unless they’re using a satellite. No drones in the area. But: somebody was down in that container yard and not long ago. They ate some cookies inside a container and dribbled some crumbs around. If the crumbs had been there more than a couple of hours, the mice would have eaten them. So, it was a surveillance stand. The container had a perfect view of the front of the warehouse.”
“What’s on the cameras?”
“Nothing. The cameras were wiped,” Boyadjian said.
“You’re shitting me,” Step said. “Even the cloud?”
“Even the cloud.”
“That tells us something,” Step said. “Who could erase the cloud video and be interested in stealing high-end chips?”
“Yeah. Hackers. The train nerds,” Boyadjian said.
“Which means the train nerds know who we are. That’s a problem.”
Boyadjian said, “One good thing about that.”
“What’s that?”
Boyadjian laughed. “It’s your problem, Step, not mine. I’ll send you a bill for tonight. You’ll get the frequent-flier discount.”
* * *
Step took one more call, a few minutes later, five minutes out of Long Beach. He didn’t recognize the number, but given the ongoing hassle, he decided to answer it.
“Yeah?”
“Mr. Step? This is George Hewitt.”
“Where the hell are you?” Step asked.
“On my way out of town. I’m going back to Montana,” Hewitt said. “I figure when you find out what happened tonight, you’d cut my nuts off.”
“Count on it,” Step said.
“How about if I tell you exactly what happened? Maybe you wouldn’t do that, if we ever meet up again.”
After some quiet consideration, to let Hewitt sweat, Step said, “All right. If it’s any value to me and you’re not to blame, I’ll let it go. You got my word. On my honor.”
Hewitt told him exactly what happened, with only one distinct lie. Two women, young, good-looking, both armed, faked him out when he went to his truck for a pack of cigarettes. They were not armored up, like law enforcement might be.
“They were professionals, Mr. Step,” he said. “One of them wanted to kill me, but the other one wouldn’t let her. The first one scared the shit out of me. They taped me all up with that packaging tape you had there and took some boxes. Twelve, I think. I could hear them talking and they decided to take twelve so they’d know if it was all one chip, or if there were different chips. I’m so sorry . . . I figured it’d be healthier for me to get out of town, but I still wanted to fill you in.”
“You did the right thing, George,” Step said, then telling his own distinct lie. “You’re good with us. I’d still hire you, if you decided to come back. We can use guys like you.”
“Well, I thank you very much, but, I think I’ll keep going,” Hewitt said. “Oh, and I don’t know if this would help, but they were talking about a guy named Paul, like maybe he was their boss.”
“A guy named Paul.”
“Yeah, Paul. That’s all I got. I’m gonna hang up now and throw this phone out the window.”
He was gone. He’d keep going, Step thought, as he clicked his phone off, but not to Montana. He almost certainly was headed back to Oklahoma, where he came from. Though Step was pissed, he’d let it go, unless Hewitt was actually stupid enough to come back to Long Beach.
So: two women. Actually, sounded like they might be GRU. The GRU would have the resources to wipe the cloud if they wanted to. While the FBI certainly had women agents, they didn’t send out two women, without backup, to steal computer chips. The GRU might . . .
Was Moscow involved? Or was it the train nerds? But where would the train nerds get two female hitters? That wouldn’t be a problem for the GRU.
A puzzle that needed to be solved. After he made sure the remaining chips were secure, he’d get back home and talk it over with Victoria.
* * *
At the warehouse, he found Al, Richard, and Yvgeny loading the chip boxes into a large box truck, with a smaller box truck sitting off to one side. Inside the building, he took a look at the 3M tape that had been used to tape up Hewitt; Al pointed out what looked like arm hair in a ring of tape. Hewitt had apparently been telling the truth.
Step helped carry boxes himself and when they were all loaded in the second truck, took a look at the alarm console, which operated the cameras. It had been broken open. He thought about it for a moment, then told Yvgeny to call the security company to report the break-in, but to tell them that nothing had been taken because the warehouse had been empty. Probably, he was to say, street people looking for anything they could steal—no point involving the police, because they wouldn’t do anything about a theft-free break-in with no damage and no obvious clues. That should also keep the security service shut up.
On the way back to Beverly Hills, he called Boyadjian, the man who’d checked for surveillance at the warehouse and had found the container site with bread crumbs. Boyadjian came up on the second ring: “Yeah?”
“Another job for you. We took that Delph guy, and the couple, but we never did do anything about the crazy guy. Sovern? The sailboat guy? We need to find him and nail his feet to a floor and ask him some serious questions.”
“Tonight? You want us to find him tonight?”
“Yeah, tonight. Right now. We took a two-million-dollar hit tonight,” Step said. “You told me he might be up in Oxnard, somewhere. How many sailboats can there be in Oxnard?”
“Lots. Hundreds. Gotta be a dozen marinas up there, maybe more.”
“Get off your computer and do some walking around,” Step said. “Knock on doors. You’re looking for a crazy nerd computer genius who lives on a sailboat. How many can there be?”
“Many. And we can do that, but it’ll cost you,” Boyadjian said. “Three thousand a day. No guarantees with a three thousand minimum, pay me later. I’ll send my best team.”
“That’s fine. Start now. Don’t screw me, but don’t worry if it goes a few days.”
