Okay, he thought. He called the number again. The same man walked over to the phone and picked it up.
“Put the boxes on the belt. When it’s in the next building, I’m going to stop the belt. When I’m satisfied that the money is real, I’ll call you back and tell you where I’ve put the item. Until then, I’m disabling the cipher locks. Don’t try to leave.” “How long?” the man asked. It sounded like Tangent; Carson was pretty sure he recognized the voice. He could not, however, see the man’s face on the monitor. “Fifteen minutes,” he replied, hitting the button to disable the lock. “The item is prepositioned.”
“How do we know you won’t just take off?”
Yes, that was Tangent. “We’ve been through this. The item is worth nothing to me. It’s of use only to you and your ultimate customers.
Believe me, it’s not something I want to keep.” He hung up then, not wanting to waste any more time talking.
He watched them upload the boxes onto the belt. They stood together in a group, watching the belt slowly carry the boxes through the interbuilding aperture. He switched monitors, focusing on the boxes as — they came into view in the demil room, into the lighted area between the aperture and the intake of the Monster. When all four boxes were visible, he walked over to the emergency firefighting control panel and remotely opened the circuit breakers for the conveyor belt. He could reset them if he needed to once he got to the demil room itself. Then he studied the image of the demil room on the monitor. The security cameras inside the building could not zoom down, as they were only there for intruder detection and filming, but it looked like money: stacks of bills crammed into the boxes, each stack bound in a narrow paper wrapper.
Show time, he thought. Time to go see if it’s real or if it’s Memorex.
Before he got up, he took one last scan of the entire monitor bank: the tarmac area, the individual warehouse surveillance cameras, the feed-assembly room. The men were still all there, sitting now on upturned boxes, almost invisible in the dim lights of the battery-operated fire lights. One of them was smoking a cigarette, the glowing tip unnaturally bright in the grayish low-contrast display. The demil room, with the boxes in clear focus under the ceiling light. The admin building, with its empty corridor. The admin parking lot — empty.
Not empty.
He froze halfway out of the chair, staring at the image. All the way at the back of the parking lot, deep in the shadow of a line of parked boxcars, he could see the grille of a car. A big car. That’s all he could see. Nothing of the interior, just the grille. The rest of the car was in deep shadow.
So where in the hell did that come from? Has it been there all along?
“I don’t think so,” he intoned to himself. He scanned the other monitors again, looking hard for any other changes, especially in the cameras pointed out onto the tarmac area and the truck lane. The truck lane.
There were four trailers parked in a row on their jack stands. Next to them were two tractor trucks, in one of which he’d planted the cylinder.
He looked hard. Something wrong with the image of the trailers. There.
The last trailer on the line was sporting some extra tires, smaller tires, about halfway back along the frame on the far side.
A car there. Or was it two cars? Son of a bitchl Tangent had brought help. Lots of help, from the look of it. In the time it had taken to get them into the feed-assembly building, at least three vehicles had moved into position. Waiting for what, a signal of some kind? There was no camera looking into the approach to-the truck lane, but he was willing to bet there was another car there, too. Damn, damn, damnl
So move your ass. Time for plan B.
He smacked the switch to turn out the lights, grabbed the empty briefcase, and slipped out of the control room. He walked quickly to the back door of the flea-market warehouse and looked through the window out onto the tarmac. His original plan had him walking across the tarmac to the derail building. He thought about those three cars. The one out front of the admin building could not see into the tarmac area. The one hidden behind the trailers also had its view blocked, although there might be watchers positioned behind those big truck tires. But if there was another car in the approach to the alley, they would have an unobstructed view of the tarmac, at least once he stepped out into the open area between the last lane of pallets and the demil building.
He took a deep breath. Tangent and his crew had seemed relaxed in the feed-assembly building. I’d be relaxed, too, if I had eight, ten more people outside, he thought. They probably weren’t planning to do anything until they had the cylinder and he had the money. Which meant that his walk to the demil building would be the get-ready signal to them, but they’d have nothing to gain by moving on him yet. By carrying a briefcase, he hoped they’d think he had the cylinder with him. Since they didn’t know what the cylinder looked like, they could not know it wouldn’t fit in a briefcase. He was counting on that.
He wiped the sweat off his forehead, took another deep breath, and put his hand on the door release. Okay, then, let’s do it.
He stepped through the door and walked directly out across the tarmac.
The night air was colder than he had expected, and his footsteps on the tarmac echoed off the sheer metal walls of the warehouses. He resisted an almost overwhelming urge to look left, down into that truck alley. If they saw him looking, the whole thing might kick off prematurely. They obviously planned to make the swap and then get their money back. Well, he had provided for that little contingency.
He walked down the nearest lane of pallets to the one containing the propeller blades, then past Tangent’s car, and across the seemingly endless open space between the car and the demil building. The skin on his face felt unusually warm in the night air, and he briefly imagined night scopes tracking him from unseen watchers at either end of the tarmac. He felt like the original sitting duck out here.
Twenty feet.
Ten feet.
Could they hear him next door, in the feed-assembly building? Almost there. Stay cool.
He reached the demil building, punched in the code, and let himself into the anteroom. He dumped the briefcase and walked quickly into the control room, which housed the Monster’s control console. He’d earlier placed the console in standby mode, so all the buttons were lighted. He found the button that placed the demil building’s access devices in local-operator control and shut down the cipher lock on the front door.
It was a heavy steel door, so it wasn’t like someone could just kick it in.
He walked over to the conveyor belt and examined the boxes. It looked like real money. Tightly wadded packages of hundred-dollar bills were crammed into the boxes. He pulled the first of two duffel bags he’d positioned near the conveyor belt and began unloading the money. It was packed very tightly, right up to the top of each box, so he had to pry at the edges of the top layer to get to the rest of the money. The second layer down looked and felt just like the first layer. All right!
He pocketed several of the banded packages from the top layer in case something went wrong. If they had put counterfeit in, it would be deeper in the box; the top layers were probably real money.
Next he had planned to test it. He wished he could get one more look at the monitor bank to see if anyone was in motion out there. But he had the sense that he was running out of time. So far, they had followed his orders. But for how long would they be so cooperative? Tangent was obviously preparing to double-cross him. Okay, then; they simply wouldn’t get the cylinder.