Kelvin Welch leaned against a lamppost at the intersection of Dauphine and St. Peter, taking a moment to stop and admire the mayhem. A juggler costumed as the top-hatted voodoo spirit Baron Samedi swerved his six-foot-tall unicycle around a jazz quartet in the middle of the street, avoiding collision by a cat’s whisker. The combo’s double bass boomed applause. The reverb seemed to shake the plastic beads dangling from the necks of stragglers at the end of a second-line parade disappearing around the corner. A gal in a straw cowboy hat and a lacy sundress caught Welch looking. She shot him a big ol’ inviting grin before the endless river of tourists swept her away. The band caught the chatter and the drunken laughs and the occasional shriek that floated by and mixed them right into the jam, the crowd just one more instrument.
Welch smiled around the foot-long straw of his brandy milk punch. This trip had been a long time coming. So far it was meeting all expectations.
Then he saw the dude with the red mask. Again. His smile vanished.
The dude wasn’t looking at him. Not this time. He seemed to be ogling a couple of honeys in jean shorts and halter tops making their unsteady way up the block. But this was the third time Welch had spotted that same mask in as many hours.
Two times too many, he thought.
Welch had been sliding up one block and down the next since nine o’clock that night. Long enough after sundown that being outside was bearable. The heat now was from the people. Surging, jostling, the tourists like himself so easy to spot that they might as well have state license plates hung around their necks as jewelry. You had to stay sharp. A husband and wife with matching OK State T-shirts tripped off the curb, recovered, stumbled back onto the redbrick sidewalk, arms still draped around one another like a team in some boozy three-legged race. Welch had toasted their success with his plastic flute of frappé. As he raised the glass, he’d met the eyes of the guy in the red mask across the street.
The guy had looked away and Welch had done the same, barely registering the moment. Masks were common enough, even after the vaccine, even in the crush of the French Quarter where people tossed away all inhibitions along with their plastic doubloons.
An hour and three blocks later, Welch saw the man again. He’d swung through a cypress-paneled joint for another drink, becoming momentarily distracted by a waitress with a skirt so tight that Welch had been trying to make out which cheek had the tattoo. Red Mask had been outside, walking slowly up the sidewalk across the way. Welch had gotten a better look at the dude that time. White, medium height, brown hair slicked down by either gel or the heat. A black polo shirt and jeans. Nothing weird. But Welch had watched from the corner of his eye until the dude was out of sight.
He knew to pay attention to those negative vibes. Coming off three tense months in Dallas, Welch’s radar was extra sensitive to any shift in the patterns around him. Any sign that his cover might be in jeopardy, and his safety along with it.
Not that the Dallas assignment had been dangerous. Playing the fool during the day, pretending to be interested in whatever idiot TV show the other guys in Data Services had watched the evening before. Welch had been too busy probing the company’s internal safeguards and network traps every night to watch shit. Even after he’d cracked their system and stripped the intel he’d been sent to get, he’d had to stick around for two more anxious weeks until the contract was up and he could do the So Sorry, Got Another Offer jig before catching the next plane.
Now, with a thick roll in his pocket and a hundred times that much money coming soon for a job well done, Welch had been more than ready to relax and enjoy his vacation in New Orleans.
And if it weren’t for the guy in the mask, he would be. He resented the man for spoiling his fun.
Could be a mugger, he reflected as he sauntered down Toulouse. A scavenger who had flagged him for carrying cash earlier in the night. Welch felt he could handle a robber, or at least give the asshole the slip. He kept track of the people behind him as he strolled seemingly without care. Using the windows, car windshields, his phone screen to see if the man in the mask was on his tail. Welch turned one corner, then another. The guy didn’t reappear.
After ten blocks of trolling without a bite, Welch shook his head in frustration. Twitchy. That’s what he was. Three months of guarding his every move and utterance had worn him raw. The booze and the humidity probably didn’t help.
Crossing paths with another tourist a few times didn’t even qualify as unusual. Welch knew how the bon temps rolled around here. Everyone seeing the same sights, the same bars and their signature drinks from the guidebooks. Look, there was the cowgirl who’d smiled at him back on St. Pete. She was shimmying her way into a saloon with purple neon and fake Spanish moss on every wall. Hot zydeco—from a jukebox, not the sweet live stuff—pulsed from the open doorway.
Welch followed, sidestepping a voodoo crone and her sidewalk table strewn with cards and fetishes. The old woman’s outstretched claw brushed Welch’s wrist as he passed. He ignored her sales pitch disguised as an urgent plea. He’d make his own fortune, thank you very kindly.
The cowgirl had disappeared into the crowd somehow. Welch looked for her while waiting in the crush at the bar for a replacement beverage. Something with rum and pineapple bits on a skewer. By the time he had the drink in his hand, he needed relief. He went looking for the men’s room. The first door was the kitchen and the second—
Shit, he was outside. From the smell, plenty of dudes had made the same mistake and decided the alley would do just fine for their urgent appointment. The door had locked behind him. Welch edged around the Dumpster and wandered toward the fence at the end of the alley. Had to be a gate somewhere.
He heard the door to the bar open again and turned around. His eyes widened in recognition and he began to return the warm smile, an instant before a sound like a celery stalk snapping coincided with a massive blow to his chest. The drink dropped from his hand, the plastic cup bouncing and splashing pink rum over his shoes and shins. He tried to speak. There was no breath to carry the words. A second explosion of pain knocked him to his knees. Welch looked down toward the agony in his body, way down, sinking until he was lying on his side on the reeking bricks.
Hands were going over him, through his pockets. His body shivered despite a warmth that had spread all down his chest and stomach. He heard steps running until they faded into the brass blare of the trumpeter on the street beyond.
Kelvin Welch listened as the note rose, fell, smoothed into a drawn-out wail.
Long time coming, this trip, he thought.
He closed his eyes and let the music take him.
Van Shaw crouched in the shadows, as natural a home to him as the warm Gulf waters to a tiger shark. He watched as the guard with the charcoal gray uniform and company-issued Smith & Wesson completed his circuit of the dim warehouse. The guard’s eyes passed over the upper level of the hangarlike building and Shaw’s hiding place without pause. In his black clothes and balaclava, Shaw was next door to invisible. His relaxed breathing made no sound through the fabric of the mask.
The guard continued his patrol down Row G. One of a dozen rows of industrial-capacity cargo shelves stacked four levels high. The top shelves were forty feet above the smooth concrete floor, the same height as the catwalk where Shaw waited outside the warehouse’s small offices. When the warehouse was built thirty years before, its offices had been elevated to allow foremen to supervise activity around the huge building without having to walk the rows themselves.
Shaw had spent a quiet evening earlier in the week studying the blueprints and other building schematics on file with the Port of Seattle. The plans had been updated eight years previously, when the warehouse was modified to comply with accessibility laws. The catwalk had stairs and a new elevator at one end and a fire-escape door at the other, which had provided Shaw with a convenient entry point once he’d disabled the alarm.
The offices were empty now. So were most of the shelves and the steel cages just below the catwalk, where especially valuable or confidential goods would have been stored when the building was a working bonded warehouse. The guard’s patrol was perfunctory. His company protected each of the ten warehouses in the yard off Pier 90. Just because this one was under new management, and largely vacant, that didn’t mean the building was left out of the nightly rounds.
But few goods meant little heed. Shaw heard the door click as the guard left.
He waited for two minutes. He had watched the shipping yard for two nights and a day from a variety of vantage points. The guards on the midnight-to-eight shift made overlapping circuits once every ninety minutes, their routes tracing a latticework around the buildings. When he was confident that both men would be headed away from this end of the yard, he stole down the flights of metal steps to the main floor.
As quiet as Shaw’s footfall was, it still seemed to carry in the cavernous space. He could hear the rasp of each strap of his rucksack against his shoulders as he moved.
The cage he wanted was at the far end. Shaw didn’t approach it. Not yet. He’d spotted the cameras from the catwalk. Every row of shelves had one of the glossy black bubbles at each end, mounted twelve feet high and positioned to monitor activity on the main floor, including the secure steel cages.
He’d seen identical cameras the day before, while walking past two other active warehouses in the yard. Shaw had sent himself a box of packing materials through a freight company using Warehouse 7, which granted him access to the yard. He’d parked his truck far enough away for a long stroll and an equally long look through the open hangar doors. The security service had installed the same electronics in each facility. Closed-circuit, and running off the main power.
Shaw could have cut the power and disabled the camera watching the cage, but he had a more elegant solution in mind. He skirted the wall of the warehouse to where he could risk a dash to the first monolith of empty cargo shelves. He jumped to catch the edge of the first level, ten feet above the floor, and pulled himself up. The shelf was formed of solid metal slats. Shaw stepped lightly down the row, like walking down a train track on railroad ties, until he came up behind the camera.
He was familiar with the brand and had the necessary gear to grease it in his ruck. It took three minutes for him to tap into the camera’s circuit and copy the still image of the empty floor to a customized smartphone. He bypassed the feed so that the image would be the only thing seen on the monitor screens at the guard’s office, two hundred forty yards away at the eastern side of the freight area. When he was done, he lowered himself to the floor and walked without hurry to the cage.
It was a solid piece of construction. A ten-by-ten enclosure of cut-resistant wire in a tight mesh. Each wall bolted into the concrete floor. Its interior covered with hard black plastic sheeting to shield the cage’s contents from view. A big RR Brink mechanical lock secured the rolling door.
The Brink was serious hardware, but he could defeat it. His concern was for what might happen once he swung the door open.
In one compartment of his ruck was a glass spray bottle. He put an extra set of leather gauntlets over his nitrile gloves and turned his face away as he sprayed a thick layer of the liquid in the bottle through the metal mesh onto the plastic screen that hid the cage’s interior.
The corrosive worked quickly. Within two minutes the plastic had softened enough for Shaw to cut a hole by working the blade of a jackknife through the mesh. Careful not to inhale the last of the acidic fumes, he leaned close and shone his flashlight into the dark space beyond.
A white pedestal stood in the center of the floor. And on the pedestal the item Shaw had come for.
The cage’s alarm sensor was right out in the open, like a dare. Suspended at the far corner of the ceiling. Passive infrared to measure changes in temperature. An off-the-shelf security measure any business might use.
Shaw had expected something . . . more unusual.
This is a weird score, he thought, and not for the first time.
A fast break? He could open the Brink lock, rush inside, and be out of the building long before the guards responded in any effective manner.
No, he decided. It was an avoidable risk, putting himself in a position where he had no alternative but to escape at a run. Plus, smash-and-grabs had no style. Shaw wanted to beat the system, not just bulldoze his way through it.
Shaw’s grandfather, the original Donovan Shaw, would have scoffed. The iron-willed bastard had trained his daughter’s son to be entirely unprecious about their profession. Getting away clean was all that mattered. Most of the time, Shaw still followed the old thief’s precepts.
But this job was different. Special. The papers in the inside pocket of Shaw’s fleece vest, paper-clipped and folded in precise thirds as if still in the original envelope, were enough to verify that.
He climbed up on top of the cage’s roof and got to work. Cordless power shears served to slice through the wire mesh and the plastic underneath as well. The shears made an unholy whine in the open warehouse, but within thirty seconds the last echo had vanished.
Shaw removed a mottled sheet of flexible acrylic from his ruck and slid it down through the slit he’d cut in the roof, covering the IR sensor. The sensor’s lens was designed to break the protected area into sections, to allow the alarm to detect changes as a heat source moved from one section to another. Shaw’s acrylic sheet muddied the received signal, like smearing oil on a camera lens.
He jumped down to the floor. His lockpicks were tucked into a leather sheath around his wrist for quick access. He made the Brink lock confess its secrets in less time than it would have taken to cut a spare key.
Shaw opened the door to shine his flashlight on the object occupying the pedestal.
A figure carved in black stone. An ape, or how someone in ancient times might have imagined an ape if they’d never seen one for themselves. Maybe a baboon, given the statue’s squarish snout. Whatever it was, it was happy. An erect phallus protruded two inches from between its squatting haunches.
Somebody had a sense of humor, Shaw thought.
Before he left, Shaw set a business card on the pedestal. The card wasn’t his. None of the professions in his life, not thief or soldier or whatever he was now, had required such accessories. The slanted orange letter D at the center of the pristine white card looked almost fluorescent in the gloom.
The card might not have his name and number, but the owner of the stone primate would be calling him soon enough. Shaw had no doubt of that.
At the antique desk in the study of his apartment in South Lake Union, Olen Anders worked by the light of a single lamp. Anders preferred the room this way. The darkness surrounding the pool of illumination improved his focus. He was completing his final notes on a report sent to him by Droma International’s chief marketing officer. He had just added his initials next to the orange D on the report’s cover when his phone rang.
Anders let it ring twice more before setting his pen aside. He hadn’t expected Kilbane’s call for at least another thirty minutes. He put the phone on speaker.
“Yes, Warren?” he said.
“I’m on Alaskan Way, sir. Shaw has left the cargo yard and is heading east.”
Kilbane’s voice sounded tense to Anders. But then the man was rigid by nature. One of the reasons Warren Kilbane made an effective head of security. A fervent belief in regulation.
“Does he have the statue?” Anders said.
“He may. He was inside the warehouse for twenty-eight minutes. The alarms didn’t go off. The guards look oblivious.”
Intriguing, Anders thought. And unfortunate.
“We’ll have to assume he was successful,” he said to Kilbane.
“Should I reacquire the item? We can intercept him before he reaches his car.”
Anders could imagine Kilbane sitting in his car trying, like a well-trained watchdog, not to strain against the leash. Kilbane had likely armed himself tonight in the event that action would be required. Perhaps even hoping it would be.
“No, don’t interfere,” Anders said. “It’s enough that we’re aware Shaw completed the task.”
“What if he decides to keep the statue for himself?”
“I don’t believe he will.” Though Shaw proving to be unreliable at this stage might be for the best.
“Sir,” said Kilbane. “Hiring Shaw is . . . strange.”
Even for Sebastien is what he meant, Anders knew.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Kilbane finished. “A professional thief.”
Kilbane must feel strongly about the matter to challenge the will of their mutual employer. Anders supposed having someone like Shaw within his sphere of operations would feel like sandpaper against Kilbane’s desire for order.
Anders also agreed with his security chief’s assessment. Employing Shaw was a risk he would prefer not to take. Still, better to present a united front.
“Ours is not to reason why, Warren. Thank you for your attention to this. You and your men.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll send them home if that’s all.”
Anders said it would be.
He rose and went to the sideboard to pour himself a modest glass of the Sandeman port that Greta had set out. It was late for alcohol, but he would be awake for some time yet.
Shaw was a concern. Anders now wished he had made security at the warehouse even tighter. Impossible, even. Though Sebastien would have countered that move by saying any reasonable test for Shaw had to offer a chance at success.
Sebastien Rohner was bold. He’d often told Anders that his confidence was one-half of their success, Anders’s scrutiny combined with Sebastien’s daring. A kind way of saying that he sometimes found Anders’s meticulous methods tiresome. Ultimately Sebastien was in charge. If he were truly determined, there was no argument Anders might mount that would be capable of diverting him.
The Rohner wealth had been built on such courage. Enough accumulated capital that even the twin blows of overextending themselves in new markets followed by the crash of the pandemic had been a survivable situation. Nearly.
Now, if Droma International were to remain solvent, Sebastien viewed his scheme as the only means to victory. He would not be denied. The most Anders could do was prepare for every eventuality.
Including an unknown factor like Shaw. On the surface Shaw was perfect for what Sebastien had in mind. The criminal expertise, the scars that spoke of a violent past. The man looked like what he was. And Shaw had proved his skill tonight. Sebastien would interpret that as a good omen.
In mathematics, to solve for a variable, one surrounded it with as many known values as possible. Anders would do the same for Shaw. Isolate him. Have Kilbane and his men keep a close watch.
Before long, if Sebastien’s gamble paid off, the thief would become a solution instead of a problem.
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