Among Thieves Page 17

  “Okay. When you figure?”

  “Couple of hours. Did you line up your guys?”

  “Four of them. Dudes we can trust. You want them on board now?”

  “Not yet. But tell them they should be somewhere we can reach them if we need them. Are you back at the place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did Ciro get his cousin Joey?”

  “Supposed to be on the way.”

  “Good. Get the shotguns out and keep watch. I don’t think anything is coming our way tonight, but be ready.”

  “What happened with Kolenka?”

  “He may have a dog in this fight.”

  “How?”

  “Markov is paying him to operate in his backyard.”

  Manny made an unintelligible noise, but didn’t comment beyond saying, “Anything else?”

  “Stand by.”

  Next, Beck called Alex Liebowitz and told him to gather what he needed for a black bag job and to be ready to go within the hour.

  Beck checked his watch. Seven-thirty.

  Demarco asked, “Now what?”

  “Now we go on the offensive. Fast.”

  27

  Alan Crane spent nearly two hours cleaning up after the bloody fight in his loft, followed by an hour at his computer identifying positions that he could close out without taking significant losses.

  But he couldn’t really concentrate. He kept imagining a ball peen hammer smashing into his hand with the same force that Markov pounded it into his dining room table.

  Crane paced back and forth, barefoot, on the Calamander hardwood floors of his Tribeca loft trying to convince himself that Markov wouldn’t make good on his threats of violence if he succeeded in keeping the losses to a minimum.

  Unfortunately, there were too many of his positions underwater. He was going to have to monitor every holding closely, take advantage of every uptick, and close out anything immediately that turned south. It would mean constant attention over as many days and hours as he could get from Markov.

  Crane kept pacing, trying to figure out his alternatives. He needed to know how this thing had suddenly blown up. What had Milstein told Markov?

  He picked up his cordless phone and pulled on his headset so he could keep pacing. He punched a speed-dial number. Milstein answered on the second ring.

  “Alan.”

  “Yes. So Frederick, do you mind telling me what the fuck is going on?”

  “Don’t shout at me.”

  Crane shouted even louder. “I’ll fucking shout at you all I want. Markov almost took a hammer to me, and his goons tried to kill that guy you sent up here. Who the hell was he? He shot one of Markov’s men and crippled another before he got away. They practically destroyed my place. It took me two hours to clean up the blood.”

  “What!?”

  “You fucking heard me, Frederick, goddammit, or have you gone deaf?”

  “All right. Calm down, Alan. Calm down. This is crazy. He was just supposed to go up there and hear your side of the story. Markov was supposed to explain to you the deal I made to pay off the woman, get you to agree to back off, and convince that thug to go away. What the hell happened?”

  Crane took a deep breath.

  “Christ. Tell me exactly what happened to you and what you told Markov. Then I’ll explain what happened here.”

  It took five minutes for each man to fill in the other. Finally, Milstein said, “Alan, this is completely out of hand. We’ve got to contain this. We have to shut this down.”

  “Forget it. You’re not shutting down Leonard Markov. Not after what happened up here.”

  “What’s he going to do?”

  “He wants to kill Olivia and Beck. And if I don’t close out millions in positions without incurring big losses, he’s going to kill me, too.”

  “I can’t believe this is happening. Is Markov really threatening to kill you?”

  “Yes. No. Not exactly. But he’s doing a good job of terrifying me into thinking anything is possible.”

  “What do you want me to do, Alan?”

  “Has Leonard called you?”

  “Yes. I’m supposed to locate Olivia Sanchez for him.”

  “So do it. What about Beck?”

  “He wants me to find him, too.”

  “Good. Find them and let Leonard take care of them.”

  Milstein’s voice dropped into a tense whisper, “I’m not in the business of getting people killed, Alan. I didn’t even start this.”

  “Neither did I. That bitch started it. And made it worse by sending in her tough guy threatening to kill you. And I’m sure he came up here thinking he could do the same to me. And now they’re both going to get what’s coming to them. It’s out of our hands.”

  “This is going to cost us millions.”

  “Maybe not, Freddy. I’ll get Markov his money. Hopefully, he’ll see how stupid it was demanding we close out his positions so quickly. Maybe I can talk him into putting everything back.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m not giving up without a fight. You do whatever Markov wants. Keep him off my back while I squeeze everything out of his portfolio I can. We’ll see where it comes out. That’s all we can do.”

  Milstein winced. “How bad is it going to be?”

  “The portfolio could take a twenty, thirty percent hit.”

  “Jeesuz.”

  “Look, stop worrying about it. It’s my job. Just make Markov believe you’re doing everything you can for him.”

  “Where’s Markov now?”

  “How the fuck should I know? Probably gathering a million of his Bosnian ex-militia so he can go kill everybody in sight. Stay with it, Freddy. Markov is going to do what he wants to do. You do what you can to help him.”

  Crane hung up.

  28

  Beck and Demarco arrived back in Red Hook just before 9 p.m. The bar downstairs was dark. They parked the Mercury Marauder across the street, stepped out of the car, and waited a few moments so they could be seen, just to make sure they wouldn’t be shot as they walked in the front door.

  Beck wasn’t worried about Manny or Ciro, but he wasn’t taking any chances knowing that Ciro’s cousin Joey B had arrived to help guard the headquarters. Joey had a unique ability to act unencumbered by thought.

  Beck and Demarco stood outside the front door, waiting. Beck took note of his new front window, the bottom third painted black exactly the way it had been. Ciro popped open the front door. Beck and Demarco entered quickly. Sure enough, Joey B had been planted in the bar downstairs with a shotgun. Beck greeted Joey B. He always got a kick out of trying to get his arms around Joey while receiving a bone-crushing hug from one of Joey’s huge arms.

  Beck broke away from Joey B’s one-arm bear hug and asked Ciro, “Is Manny upstairs?”

  “Yeah,” said Ciro. “Alex, too.”

  “Okay, let’s go upstairs and talk. Joey, come with us and keep watch from the window up there. You can hear the plan.”

  They quickly assembled around the coffee table. Joey stood at the second floor window looking out at the street, looking back at the others, walking from one end of the drapes to the other.

  Just as Beck and the others sat down around the big coffee table, his cell buzzed.

  “Yeah.”

  Ricky Bolo’s voice asked him, “So we made it over to that Tribeca address you gave us.”

  “Good. You have time to check the area?”

  “Yeah. Did you figure the street in front of that address was gonna be filled with hard guys?”

  “Shit.”

  “Whatever you’re interested in on that block, somebody else is, too, Jimmy boy. There’s two gangster SUVs, one at each end of the block. Tinted windows, the whole nine yards, but we caught looks at the inside through the windshields.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Each of the SUVs has a driver and a bad guy in the front seat and more hard cases in the backseats. But they�
��re still coming into the neighborhood. Every once in a while someone gets out of a taxi or shows up on the street and joins the party in one of the SUVs. The one near Washington Street should be about full. We saw four bozos get into that one. Only two so far on the one near Greenwich.”

  Beck thought about what Ricky was telling him. Clearly, the Bosnians were gathering the troops. But why? To protect Crane? Seemed like an awful lot of men for that. What then? Had Kolenka located the Red Hook headquarters for Markov? Were they gathering to mount an attack?

  He thought about how he should respond. It didn’t take long.

  “Okay, Ricky, here’s what I want you to do.”

  Beck gave instructions while the others watched and listened. The tension in the loft cranked up significantly. By the time Beck stopped talking, everyone knew what was next.

  Beck hung up. Ciro asked, “So?”

  Beck didn’t say anything. He sat, lost in thought. Finally after about twenty seconds, he spoke. “Okay. I don’t have time to fill you in on all the background. There’s someone on Hubert Street in Tribeca I needed to talk to tonight. And maybe some other shit. But now it looks like he’s either being guarded, or the guys watching him are gathering up enough strength to hit us tonight. Or both. I figure they didn’t know where we were, but now, or soon, they might get our location. So, we have to hit them first.

  “We’ve got to move now. Manny, Ciro, you go with Demarco. I’ll take Alex and Joey in Olivia’s car. Everybody arm up. By the time we get to Tribeca, I’ll have it figured out what everyone should do. Alex, make sure you have your bag of tricks. You’re going to be doing a break-in.”

  Everyone stood up and moved. No questions. No comments.

  Beck was back on his cell phone before he hit the back stairs.

  29

  When they’d first arrived, Ricky and Jonas had driven around the Tribeca neighborhood in their nondescript van getting a general sense of who was on the streets. After Beck talked to them, the Bolo brothers circled the blocks from Hubert to Greenwich to Beach and back, on foot. They checked for any security cameras that might catch images of what was to happen.

  Ricky and Jonas were experienced burglars, safecrackers, and locksmiths. They knew whatever there was to know about CCTV cameras, alarm systems, sensors, locks, and surveillance techniques. They were experts at breaking and entering. They knew the policies of every major security company that offered service in New York City, including response times, patrol habits, radio frequencies, and more. They were wraiths. They were a protected place’s worst nightmare. And their last name was not Bolo. Very, very few knew their real last names. Bolo had come from Ricky’s penchant for bolo neckties.

  James Beck had met Ricky in the Eastern Correctional Facility in upstate New York, a facility that had originally been known as the State Institution for Male Defective Delinquents, a name that seemed appropriate for Ricky Bolo, even though he had reached the age of thirty-seven. His brother Jonas had been incarcerated at the same time, having been arrested for the same complicated theft as his brother. But the prison authorities wisely kept them separated, so Jonas served his time in Ossining.

  Upon their release, the Bolo brothers had resumed their life of crime literally within hours. However, they now specialized in casing targets for other criminals.

  Still, Beck’s assignment for them was a bit unusual. They only had a vague idea of what he planned. And he had asked them to essentially blind an entire neighborhood.

  Ricky was the flamboyant one. Jonas, serious and studious. They made a good pair as they walked the neighborhood seeing things most people never even thought about. Both wore overcoats that hid an array of equipment. Ricky spoke on his cell via a Bluetooth earpiece, giving Beck a continuous narrative as Beck headed for Tribeca.

  Jonas walked next to Ricky, hands in pockets, ready to pull out whatever was needed for a given task, pointing out anything Ricky missed.

  The area had much more surveillance in place than most neighborhoods. Almost all the restaurants had cameras. Most of the loft buildings had cameras on their intercom panels as well as cameras watching the sidewalks in front of the buildings. The block-long parking garage on Greenwich had cameras covering the entire front of the garage. The Smith Barney building had all entrances and most of the space occupied by their wide plaza under camera surveillance.

  The trick was to eliminate as much of the surveillance as they could without causing too much attention. Street-level fish-eye lenses were easy. They covered them with a stick-on reflective material of their own design. It took about a second. The only image visible was a silver blur. The material caused no permanent damage, and had been designed to fall off in about an hour.

  Most of the cameras were at the one-story above-street level. Anything beyond that height wouldn’t give much of an image. The Bolos used telescoping poles retrofitted to hold spray paint formulated to cover plastic. It took about ten seconds to pull out a pole from under their overcoats, extend it, and spray the camera lenses with gray paint.

  By the time they’d circled the area twice, they’d degraded eleven security cameras to the point where they’d be useless, decided four others wouldn’t be a problem, and obliterated the lenses of seven more.

  The only other variables were people on the street and onlookers glancing down from apartments who might see something. But that wasn’t their problem. Beck and his men would have to deal with that.

  During their circuit, the Bolos also got better looks at the two SUVs the Bosnians were using: an Escalade and an old Chevy Blazer, parked near Crane’s Hubert Street loft. One at each end of the block.

  They reported all this to Beck and then headed back to their beat-up white van parked on Hudson Street. Beck told them to stick around somewhere they wouldn’t be noticed and monitor police broadcasts.

  The last thing the Bolo brothers did before going back to their van was to stop in front of Crane’s loft building. Ricky stood near the buzzer panel firing up a cigar, while Jonas, who looked like he was texting a long message on a smartphone, scanned the electronic lock system that secured Crane’s front door and elevator. His scanner broke the code in thirty-seven seconds. They both resumed walking. Ricky leaving billows of smoke in his wake.

  Jonas sent the data he’d secured to Alex Liebowitz riding in the backseat of the Mercury Marauder. Alex pulled something out of his backpack that looked like a portable hard drive, followed by a keypad he attached to it. Within seconds, he started fabricating a passkey to open Crane’s front door and lobby door. By the time Beck drove into the Battery Tunnel, Alex had entered the last bits of information he’d received from Jonas Bolo.

  * * *

  Demarco, driving the Mercury, arrived in Tribeca about five minutes ahead of Beck driving Olivia’s Porsche. Demarco found a legal parking spot on Hudson Street. Beck parked the Porsche illegally in front of the fire hydrant on Greenwich where he’d parked before.

  Beck called Demarco’s cell and told him to bring the others and meet him on Greenwich. All the men wore long coats and some form of cap to obscure the view of their faces. All of them had shotguns under their coats.

  When Demarco, Ciro, and Manny arrived at the Porsche there was only room for Ciro and Demarco in the car since Joey B took up most of the backseat. Manny drifted off toward a building nearby. He leaned against a wall hidden by shadows, watching.

  Beck checked his watch. 9:15 p.m., Wednesday. It seemed like an awful lot had happened since yesterday morning.

  * * *

  Alan Crane realized he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. There was no more work he could or wanted to do on the investments. The coffee he’d gulped throughout the afternoon had worn off and his appetite had surged back.

  He checked his watch: 9:30 p.m. There should be some empty tables at Harrison.

  * * *

  Beck had just worked out his plan. He motioned for Manny to come near the open passenger-side window and listen up.

  “Okay,” said
Beck. “Here’s how it’s going to work.” He pointed toward Crane’s building west of them on Hubert Street.

  “Alex, the computer you have to rig is in the top floor apartment of that building. It’s an open loft. Elevator opens directly into the apartment. There’s an office area near the east end of the floor, past the kitchen. Computer, four monitors, clearly set up as a trading station. We need to know every move Crane makes on that computer.”

  “Right. Is the place empty?”

  “I’m assuming Crane is home. I’ll convince him to come out and talk to me.”

  “You sure he’ll do that?”

  “I doubt he wants me to come in after him. I’ll be nice. When you’re done, you call me, and I’ll bring him back. How long do you think you’ll need?”

  “No telling. I have no idea what’s going on up there. If he leaves his computer on and doesn’t have any security systems running, it’ll take about fifteen minutes. If not, who knows?”

  “All right. Once I get him out, use the key card to get in. You do your thing. We’ll make sure he doesn’t get back in until you’re done.”

  “Okay. What about the bad guys outside?”

  Alex hadn’t taken his eyes off Crane’s building the whole time Beck spoke.

  “We’ll take care of that, too.” Beck turned to the others. “While I’m with this asshole Crane, the rest of you get into position to cover those two SUVs. Ciro, you and Joey take the one at the west end of the block. Manny and Demarco, you do the same for the one at this end. If they try to stop me from taking Crane, or follow us in their cars, or make any move to go into the apartment, you make sure they don’t. Clear?”

  “No,” said Ciro. “Stop how? You want us to take them out, or just the vehicles?”

  “Let’s try not going to jail tonight. Blast the crap out of their tires. Maybe pump a few shots into the engines, a couple over the roofs to keep them in the cars, and then disappear. Don’t get into a gun battle. Position yourselves near the corners so you can take a fast fade.

  “The precinct is just a few blocks away so the cops will show up quickly. Figure around three, four minutes after you start shooting. That should give you enough time to make it back to the cars, or jump in a cab, or just walk out of here. I’ll leave the keys to this car under the floor mat.”