He warned the man about watching for patrolling MP cars. He suggested they come just after midnight.
Now he had to wait. He reviewed the rest of the plan in his mind: The envelope on the door would direct them to drive back through the truck alley, where he had unlocked and opened the main gates into the area of the receiving bay. They were to drive out into the middle of the tarmac and look for a pallet of airplane propellers, which should be distinctive enough. There would be a second envelope there, which would direct them to warehouse four, where they would find a third envelope, taped to the side of the building. This one would instruct them to go to the feed-assembly building. To get each envelope, they would have to stand in a cone of light, at which he had aimed one of the surveillance cameras. He wanted to get a good look at these people before proceeding.
The final envelope instructed them to take the money into that building and wait for instructions, which would come by phone. He felt reasonably confident that he would be able to watch their every move. If one or two of Tangent’s people drifted away into the darkness, possibly to set up on Carson when he tried to leave, he wanted to be able to see that. All these envelopes and the resulting scavenger hunt would probably piss them off, but for a million in cash, too bad. Carson-was a party of one; Tangent could send as many people as he.wanted. Should have specified something about that, he thought.
Once Tangent’s people were in the feed-assembly building, he would remotely disable the front door’s cipher lock from the security control room, which would effectively lock them in. Inside the assembly area, they would find the conveyor belt running. He would call them on the building phone and instruct them to put the money into some demil containers and send them into the demil building, where he had repositioned the surveillance camera there to focus directly down onto the belt. Once he was confident they had put money in the containers, and not newspaper or bricks, he would kill all power to the demil assembly building. This would leave them in the dark, except for the battery-operated fire lights. He would call them again and tell them that he was going to retrieve the money, and that he would call one last time to tell them I where he was leaving the cylinder, which he had already hidden in the outside toolbox on one of the semis parked down in the truck lane. He would then let himself into the demil building, verify that the money was real, pack it into two prepositioned duffel bags, then go out the back fire I door of the demil building, across the alley to the fence, and get to his truck.
He had parked his pickup truck in an old fire lane that ran parallel to the DRMO perimeter fence a hundred yards away. Between the fire lane and the fence was a dense stand of brush, small trees, and high weeds. He had cut a man-sized slit in the chain-link fence at the end of the truck and trailer parking lane. His plan was to drive off the post, I and when he was at least a mile away, call the DRMO automatic exchange from his car phone, dial the extension for the feed-assembly building, and tell them how to bypass the cipher lock to get out and where to find the cylinder. By then he would have disappeared into the streets i of southeast Atlanta, with a million bucks in cash, and with that damned cylinder off his hands once and for all.
After that, well, he was making no plans. Tangent’s team, of course, wouldn’t know any of this until they arrived and began the process of envelope hunting. They might be annoyed at being locked up in the feed-assembly building, but, again, that was tough. He had warned them J he would be taking precautions.
He had also made provisions for the two most serious problems he could think of. The first would be if they m brought counterfeit money. This certainly was a possibility, since it all was going to be in brand-new hundreds. He had obtained four new one-hundred-dollar bills from a bank so he would have something to compare the prize money with. About the only test he had een able to devise was to cart a desktop copier machine into the demil building. If the bills were real, they would not copy properly; he’d tried it with the real ones and certain elements of the engraving had not come through. If Tangent’s bills did make an exact reproduction, then they were probably fakes.
He wasn’t sure what he was going to do if that happened. Probably the safest thing to do would be to go retrieve the cylinder and put it with the fake money back on the conveyor belt, fire up the Monster, and destroy it. If he couldn’t sell this damn thing to Tangent, then he probably couldn’t sell it to anyone, and the game would be over. Let the demil system shred the fake money and the cylinder, and at least there would be no evidence left behind. And if by chance a whiff or two of whatever was in the cylinder made it back into the feed-assembly building — if he cut all the power again just as the Monster was starting to chew things up, for example — well, that would be justice, wouldn’t it?
The second problem would be if Tangent and his crew brought real money but then tried to get it back once the transfer had been made. He assumed that if this was their plan, they probably wouldn’t want to make their move until they knew where the cylinder was, which was why he had set up the transfer in pieces: Unless they brought a whole lot of help, it would — be next to impossible for them to set up some kind of an ambush. But what if they did bring lots of help? Assuming he would be able to detect this fact through all the surveillance cameras, he’d go to plan B, which was to go get the money but not try to leave the DRMO.
Instead he would lock himself in the demil building, call them as planned, tell them how to disable the cipher lock, and give them a false location for the cylinder. When they left the feed-assembly building, he’d go through the interbuilding aperture into the feed assembly room, and from there he’d make his way back through the connecting warehouses to the other end of the DRMO while they scrambled” around outside looking for him. There were many places he could hide in the warehouses until morning, by which time they would have to leave when the employees came back to work. Those semis in the truck park weren’t scheduled to go anywhere for a week, so he could retrieve the cylinder, toss it into the demil run for that day, and leave with the money whenever he wanted to.
And just to be sure, he had positioned forklifts across all the entrance doors in the rest of the high-security warehouses, and more forklifts next to each connecting doorway.
But he knew that, in a sense, plan B was all wishful thinking. This thing had better go right, or life was going to get really complicated.
He looked at his watch: 10:10 p.m. Two more hours. He scanned the bank of televisions screens, but all the gray-and-black images shimmering silently on the monitors were lifeless. There was one other nagging thought hanging just out of reach in his mind, something about the cylinder itself, but he could not summon it. He waited.
38
Stafford took his coffee mug and walked with Gwen through her parlor and out to the side porch facing the pecan grove. There was just the bloom of the moon showing above the peak behind the house, and the tree frogs were out in full strength wheh she sat down beside him on the porch swing. He noticed that she had fixed her hair and put on a touch of perfume. He put the coffee mug down on a table, unsure of his left hand’s trustworthiness not to spill on a moving swing.
“I’m a little surprised Ray Sparks hasn’t called,” he said.
“Oh, he did,” she replied. “Just before dinner.”
“Really.”
“Yes. He wanted to know if you had left. I told him not yet, that I had invited you to stay for dinner with the kids. I asked if there was any message, but he said no, thanked me, and hung up. I hope you won’t be mad at me for not telling you.”