Meaner Things (22 page)

He positioned the plate over the magnets. It should have just slipped over them but instead sat out from the magnets quite a bit. As I watched, Charlie used the flat of his palms and whatever muscle power he possessed to press it into place.

“Tight fit,” he grunted.

He pushed harder and there was a satisfying metallic click as the plate finally snapped snugly over the magnets, covering them so that only the upper and lower bolts holding them to the door and door jamb remained exposed.

Charlie turned to me and grinned. “Better tight than slack,” he said. I expelled a tense breath and nodded.

Charlie wiped his forehead, rummaged again in his bag and this time extracted a wrench.

“Hurry up,” I said.

He must have sensed my state of mind as he gave me a concerned look.

“Relax. This will take a while.”

I sat on the floor behind him and watched as he unscrewed the eight bolts that held the magnetic alarm in place. It was hard, tense work. The bolts were old, had sat unmoved for years, probably decades, and were high up above Charlie’s head. He had to be careful not to yank too hard and risk accidentally dislodging one of the magnets, which would set off the alarm. Just as bad, if he wiggled the magnets too much and separated them even by a centimetre, the connection would be broken. That too would set off the alarm.

The most frightening aspect of making a mistake would be the unknown. Triggering the alarm wouldn’t set off any clanging bells or flashing red lights in the vault foyer or, indeed, anywhere else in the building. It would ‘merely’ alert the security company monitoring the vault somewhere completely off site, which in turn would alert the police.

That meant cops could be tearing down the street outside and into the building at this very moment and I had no way of knowing. The elevator doors would open and they’d come pouring in to arrest us. If we screwed this up, getaway was impossible.

Charlie wisely took his time, pausing twice for five-minute rests and a drink of our, now lukewarm, tap water. I offered to ‘take a shift’, but he refused and I didn’t protest. He was better at this kind of thing than me.

At last he had all eight bolts unscrewed. Despite myself, I got up and moved to the side to get a better look. I didn’t want to put even more pressure on Charlie, but I had to see this. There was now nothing holding the magnets in place except Charlie’s outstretched arms.

“Need any help?” I heard myself say.

“Nope, I’ll take it real gradual.”

“Yeah, you do that.”

Although both magnets were now separated from the door and jamb, they stayed connected to each other because of the tight metal harness around them. And they were still attached to the flexible steel pipe that led from the top of the door jamb magnet up into the ceiling. To anyone monitoring the alarm, nothing had changed.

Very slowly, Charlie moved the encased magnets away from the safe door and to the side, far enough to allow the door to open when the time came to do so. Would the hollow pipe, with nothing more than electrical wiring inside, be strong enough to support the weight of the heavy twin magnets?

“Careful,” I hissed.

Charlie’s hands seemed to move in slow motion as he relaxed his fingers and eased them away from the magnet casing. He held his hands poised just beneath the magnets, his eyes and mine glued on them, watching for the slightest movement. About a minute ticked by, everything in the room frozen in time.

Finally, he turned and grinned. “Solid as a rock, mate, solid as a rock.”

We’d been successful in our first, crucial task, but our evening’s work was far from over. We didn’t want to have to repeat this slow, laborious and nerve-racking job of unscrewing the eight long bolts on the night of the heist. After taking precise measurements, Charlie took a hacksaw from his bag and started sawing the end of each bolt in turn. In about half an hour he had drastically shortened all of them. He held them up to the magnets and tested his handiwork.

“Perfect,” he proclaimed. “They go through the magnet casing and slightly out the other side. Just what we want.”

“Did you leave them long enough for a few turns?” I asked him. I could barely see the bolt ends from where I stood. It would be just like Charlie to cut them too short.

“Hmmm . . . they should go a turn or two each,” he replied.

“That’s not enough! Those magnets are heavy!”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. The tape will hold them.” He took one of the rolls of double-sided tape out of his bag. “This is heavy duty. I’ve tested it with weights. Trust me, you could stick a horse against the wall with this stuff.”

I felt like screaming at him. We’d agreed to leave enough length for half-a-dozen turns of each bolt in its hole. Now we’d have to rely on the industrial tape.

He unwound the tape and applied several short strips to the magnets until he had covered the backs completely. Then he moved them back into position and pressed them against the door and jamb, tightening each of the bolts a turn or two so that they sat completely snug. When he was finished, he removed the metal plate and put it back in his tool bag.

“Impossible to tell, eh?”

I had to admit that Charlie was right. He had done a good job. No-one could possibly tell that tape, not the steel bolts, now held the magnets in place.

They just had to stay that way until Saturday night.

*

We weren’t done in this room yet.

“Where do you think the best place is for the camera?” I asked.

Charlie examined the suspended ceiling above our heads. It was composed of typical narrow criss-cross slats with large white ceiling tiles between.

“Just here to the left of the vault door,” Charlie replied. “I’ll lift a tile and fix it up at the corner.”

Now we really did need something to stand on. I looked around. There was nothing. Charlie got the tiny video camera from his bag and looked at me expectantly.

“Come on, gimme a lift on your shoulders.”

I crouched down and somehow got him on my shoulders, one bandy leg each side of me. I held on to them tightly with my arms and raised him up to the ceiling.

“You’re heavier than you look,” I grunted.

“Won’t take a minute,” he replied.

He was right; it took several. “What’s up there?” I asked him, thinking again about an alarm somewhere that I might have missed.

“Just wiring and ventilation and stuff,” he replied. He fitted the flexible videoscope above the tile, attaching it to the cross bar so that the tiny lens was directed downwards, and replaced the tile. “All done,” he said at last.

I let him down, got my breath back and looked up at the ceiling. The device was almost impossible to spot. “Sure it’ll do the job?” I asked.

“I told you, it’s top of the range. Records a pin sharp image that I view remotely.”

“OK, one more job and we’re done here.”

“You sit there and I’ll attend to it. You look like you need a rest, mate.”

It wasn’t like Charlie to be sensitive to my needs, but I took him up on his offer. He went over to the storage room door and went to work on it with his pack of picks. In less than a minute he had the door open.

He turned with an enormous smile on his face. “This one was dead easy.”

I got up and followed him inside, sidestepping a mound of giant plastic water bottles and various old paint cans strewn around the storage room floor. The lockbox was on the back wall. I took a good look at it.

“Can you open it?” I asked Charlie.

“’Course I can.”

And he did. Inside, on a big metal hook, hung the vault key. The long pipe part. With the stamp part on the business end.
All
of
it
.

“Just like you said,” Charlie grinned.

I nodded. “Let’s lock these doors and get out,” I said.

*

We tidied up our belongings, checked that we weren’t leaving anything behind, and went back to the stairway. With Charlie already in the stairwell, I flicked off the lights and removed the bag from the camera lens overhead. We went up two flights to the main floor.

From here on we had to be extra careful not to bump into the night security guards. Unlike the locked vault area, the entrance foyer was a natural place for them to patrol.

I opened the door a crack and scanned the hallway opposite the elevators. Nothing. A video camera at the end of the corridor seemed to wink at me. There was nothing for it but to step out into full view of its all-seeing eye. It was extremely unlikely that a security officer in the next few days would sit through hours of footage of a dark hallway and spot two individuals popping out the stairwell and walking down the hall towards the back of the building. Even then he might assume that we were
bona
fide
tenants working very late.

We strolled down the hall as naturally as we could, Charlie holding his heavy bag in front of him and away from the camera. After again checking that the coast was clear, we turned right into a dark corridor and made our way to the door leading out to the parking garage. This was the door with an ordinary lock rather than the other one with swipe card opening. I trained a penlight onto the door and watched anxiously as Charlie took a set of picks out of his bag and applied them to the lock.

I shouldn’t have worried. He raked the pins several times and had the lock opened in less than two minutes. It was that easy.

He was about to turn the handle when I reached out and stopped him.

“Check first for any other alarms.”

He took the penlight, bent down and examined the lock and handle area, then all around the narrow space between the door and doorframe.

“All clear,” he hissed.

We slipped quietly through the door, relocking it behind us. Charlie took a soft lead impression of the lock pins in order to make a master key later. We walked across empty parking stalls, past the deserted glass cubicle where Andy S. worked during the day, and over to the electronic gate that was now down and locked for the night.

I had already been down here several times and driven home in the Corolla to confirm that the key used to open and close the garage gate was permanently left in the opening mechanism overnight. This key raised the yellow bar and activated the metal gate, which rolled slowly back up into the roof and came down again automatically after the driver moved on out.

Of course, that was a way out after hours, not a way in. Now we were about to fix that omission. Charlie checked the key but didn’t remove it. Instead he reached into his bag of tricks and took out what he’d already explained to me was a frequency scanner. I tried to remember what he’d said about how it worked. Something about it being nothing more than a simple battery-powered transmitter connected to a circuit board. Apparently it tested all possible radio frequencies for the garage door until it hit the correct one. I did recall the number of possible frequencies there were: one thousand and twenty-four. Once we’d found the right one, Charlie would record it and make his own remote control opener to use on the night of the heist.

Charlie switched on the scanner and pointed it at the garage door. He’d said it would probably only take a few minutes. I waited behind him, doing my own visual and aural scanning of the gloomy depths all around.

I nearly jumped out of my skin when the door burst into life. Its chain and pulley mechanism made a great metallic racket that ricocheted throughout the cavernous garage while the door itself lumbered upwards at what seemed like a snail’s pace. When I’d heard this before I’d been in the Corolla with the windows wound up; now, standing right beside it, I was sure that everyone within six blocks must be able to hear it.

I grabbed Charlie’s workbag and pulled him after me out the door. Outside, the street was deserted. Charlie turned, pointed the scanner again, and the gate miraculously descended, this time with seemingly less of a roar than before.

We turned left at the end of the block and walked swiftly to the alleyway behind the A&W where I’d been storing my backpack for the last several weeks and where Charlie had parked his rust bucket Buick Regal yesterday morning.

With the tool bag stashed away in the trunk we motored across Cambie Bridge, past City Hall, and pulled up at my place. I reached for the door handle.

“Wait,” Charlie said. “What’re you thinking about tonight?”

“Success on all fronts,” I replied.

“Saturday night’s a definite go?”

I smiled. “It’s a definite go.”

SINKER

21.

PACKED AND READY

Despite desperately needing sleep I tossed and turned in bed all night, fearful about the bolts that Charlie had cut too short. I woke up at five a.m. on Friday morning, my pillowcase soaked with sweat, stark images from a nightmare about magnets falling off the vault door still fresh in my mind.

I knew I wouldn’t get back to sleep, so got up and tried to expend my nervous energy positively. After a quick breakfast, I fed Charlie’s fictitious work order and made-up business card into a small paper shredder I’d splashed out on in Staples. He wouldn’t need these anymore and I’d made a point of getting them from him. I was keenly aware that the time had arrived to collect together all compromising documentation and dispose of it.

Next, I shredded all my notes and diagrams. From here on I’d have to carry everything in my head but, God knows, I’d gone over it enough times. I’d find out on Saturday night if I’d memorised it sufficiently.

I’d find out a lot of things on Saturday night. If I’d missed an alarm anywhere. If Charlie’s electronics and devices worked. If luck was for me or against me.

If Emma could really be trusted. If I was really as good at this as I thought.

Sitting in a corner seat on the Canada Line, I made another mental checklist and filed it away.

Make
sure
there’s
plenty
of
call
time
left
on
the
cell
phones
;

Fill
the
Corolla
up
with
gas
;

Browbeat
Charlie
into
making
more
pins
for
the
safe
deposit
box
opener
.

When I got to the Zheng Building my first port of call was the vault. As soon as the elevator opened and I saw the vault door, my mind was put to rest. Charlie hadn’t been kidding. I strolled slowly up to it and inspected the magnets as inconspicuously as I could. The bolts appeared perfectly normal and the magnets seemed rock solid on their surfaces. So far at least, the double-sided industrial tape was doing a good job.

I peered up at the ceiling. The lens of the concealed video recorder was just visible, like a child’s glass marble partly protruding through a tiny hole. No-one could possibly spot it.

It was normal for tenants to visit the vault first thing and I noted three people inside as I buzzed my way in through the day gate. I opened my safe deposit box and pretended to move things from my briefcase to the box, and vice versa, until all three of the others had left.

When I was sure that no-one else was about to come in I stood outside the range of any video cameras and took an aerosol bottle of hairspray out of my bag and held it up to the motion detector. I gave it a good long squirt until there was a thick coating of sticky liquid over the lens. It only took a few seconds to dry and become perfectly clear.

*

It was just as well that security at the Zheng Building had become relaxed over the years; otherwise, someone on staff would surely have noticed my sudden change in behaviour. For all the weeks I’d been here, up until today, I’d made a point of spreading out my visits to the vault. I reckoned that too many visits might draw attention to me. But today was different – I couldn’t keep away. I wasn’t gone from the vault more than half an hour before I felt the urge to go down there again and check the magnets.

Have
they
fallen
off
?
Of
course
not
,
don’t
be
stupid
.
But
maybe
they’re
sagging
just
a
little
?
Maybe
I
need
to
go
down
and
press
them
tighter
.
No-one
will
notice
,
will
they
?
I
have
to
know
,
either
way
. . .

And so it went on until I couldn’t bear it anymore. Mid-morning I took the elevator down and checked.

The magnets hadn’t budged a millimetre.

At lunchtime I tried to go straight out the foyer door, but something made me swing by the vault instead.

The magnets still hadn’t budged a millimetre.

I tried to walk the tension off, taking side streets and avoiding the crowded malls. Eventually I felt hungry and ate a hearty soup and sandwich lunch at a little place called the Bean & Gone Café, all the while trying my best not to think about the magnets. I couldn’t allow them to obsess me. Any more of this and I’d crack up.

Back at the Zheng Building I nodded to Roger G., who ignored me completely. In the elevator my finger hovered over the number twelve, then darted down to minus two.

One more check. The magnets still looked perfect.

Back in my office I began the clearing out process. I had brought a hand-held vacuum cleaner with me, the smallest model I could find in London Drugs, and got to work on the carpet around the desk. I’d already brought home all my papers and shredded them, but I checked every drawer just in case. I sprayed the desktop, the two chairs and other fingerprint-bearing surfaces with rubbing alcohol and wiped them clean with a yellow duster.

The rest of the afternoon dragged on interminably. I could have gone home; lots of tenants left early on Fridays, especially on a long weekend like this one. But I needed to be sure that everything was completely normal down below. I chewed over whether or not to stay until seven and watch Jeff D. lock up the vault. That might look very odd this particular evening. It would be remembered later. Maybe not remembered on Tuesday morning when – if I had my way in the meantime – everything would be pandemonium; but later, when Boylan would be asking the guards about instances of unusual behaviour.

I looked at my watch in late afternoon and decided to it was time to go. At four o’clock I checked around the office one last time. There wasn’t a pick of paper or a single personal belonging left; not even a hair from my head so far as I could tell. It looked as empty and unoccupied as the day I’d first walked into it. I took the duster out of my pocket and opened the door, wiping the handle behind me as I left.

One last look at the vault door and I’d be gone.

I approached the magnets with a guilty feeling as if they were going to let me down; but, once again, they looked completely normal. So normal that for a moment I even thought that someone had discovered our alterations and replaced the shortened screws with normal ones. I scolded myself for even entertaining such a possibility: if that had happened, the vault would be closed today and police would be swarming all over the building.

No, everything was just fine.
Stop
worrying
.

I buzzed through the day gate for the last time and examined the motion detector to make sure that no-one had noticed the film and scrubbed it off. The liquid had hardened and become slightly powdery and it now seemed obvious that it had been tampered with. Would anyone notice? I thought it unlikely: the guards didn’t come into the vault, and the few tenants coming in between now and closing time would be focused on their safe deposit boxes.

One more spray before I left couldn’t hurt. I glanced around the empty vault, took out the aerosol and gave the motion detector lens another spraying.

Soft
footsteps
behind
me
.

I slid the aerosol back into my case and slowly turned.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Robie.”

It was blasted Boylan.

My heart stopped and my mouth went dry. If he’d seen what I’d just been doing, the game was up. And how had the bastard crept up on me without me hearing him? My eyes went down to his shoes and I noted they were some sort of leather moccasins, like the slippers my dad used to wear. Maybe he kept a pair in his office.

I cleared my throat. “Afternoon, Boylan. You startled me.”

“Yes, so I see. Sorry about that. Sometimes I prefer the backstairs. A little bit of exercise, eh?”

I was still trying to muster my thoughts and could only nod.

“Everything all right then?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I happened to notice you’ve been coming down here a lot recently.”

He obviously needed some kind of explanation. I quickly racked my weary brain for one.

“Only today, actually. I have important business to take care of this weekend. Could be make or break.” I gave him what I hoped was a disarming smile. He could hardly expect me to divulge serious business matters.

“Still, seems a little odd,” he insisted.

“I didn’t know there was a limit on it,” I replied huffily. “If you must know, I’m a bit absentminded sometimes. Stress can do that. This is a big venture I have coming up.”

If
he
only
knew
.

At last he seemed satisfied. “Well, let me know if I can help with anything in particular.” He turned to go, then stopped. “By the way, I haven’t got those two references from you yet.”

“Tuesday morning they’ll be on your desk,” I replied. “As I say, I’ve been busy lately.”

“Right, just don’t forget.” This time he really did leave.

I gave him two minutes then rushed to the elevator and strolled out the front door past Roger G. as calmly as I could. As soon as I was out on the street and around the corner I called Charlie.

“Did you get the combination?”

“’Course I did,” he replied, “And I’ll get it again tonight. Want to know what it is?”

“What do you think?”

“Zero to ninety nine on each dial turn, a hundred million possibilities, and it ends up being dead simple. Four twists to the right, three to the left, two to the right, and one more to the left. That’s it.”

“You got the numbers?”

“On a piece of paper right in front of me.”

*

I didn’t sleep much on Friday night either, and spent Saturday morning packing my bags. I’d already arranged with the landlord to store what little furniture I wanted to keep, and Charlie and I had moved it down into a basement storage locker earlier in the week. I brought the bags down in the elevator and stashed them in the wire mesh cage alongside the rest of my stuff. They’d be fine here until I could send for them from wherever I ended up.

Back in my apartment I went over each small step of the forthcoming evening’s activities, until I was sure they were chiselled into my memory. At noon I changed into loose-fitting casual clothes that were dark, but not sinister, and put on a pair of black, soft-soled athletic shoes.

I bussed over to Charlie’s, stopping off briefly at a green dumpster in an alley at the corner of Broadway and Main. There I deposited an old holdall containing all my Zheng Building clothes, and the hated fair-haired wig and glasses. At least from here on I’d be able to grow my hair a decent length again. No more trips to Nick’s Barber Shop for my monthly buzz cut.

At Charlie’s we didn’t hang around. He packed both his tool bags and I double checked them. Inside the first was a full tool set, a long crowbar, an emergency battery suitable for a car or a boat, an AC/DC power inverter for running power tools off the battery, drills, a pipe wrench, a pair of long-armed bolt cutters, and Charlie’s fake keys and lock picks. In the second bag were rubber gloves, rolls of duct tape, power cords, Styrofoam panels protected in bubble wrap, the telescopic handle for a dust mop, the magnetic alarm cover, three safe deposit box door busters also in bubble wrap and a bag of spare pins.

“Did you make any more of the pins?” I asked him.

“No time,” he replied. “I already have plenty, don’t worry.” I frowned, but he had a point. I checked our cell phones and we were ready to go.

I took the second bag, which was lighter, and off we went in Charlie’s rickety old Buick Regal, which seemed even more decrepit than the last time I’d seen it. We’d decided to use Emma’s place as our launching off point. There would be all sorts of traffic delays and diversions due to this evening’s big fireworks display at English Bay. By working from Emma’s apartment, which was right in the West End, we could avoid those.

I spread myself across the floor in the back of the car, with one of Charlie’s blankets on top of me.

“Do I really have to do this yet?” I protested.

“Can’t be too careful,” he replied, spreading the blanket over me.