Chapter 93: The Grifter
The champagne was open before anyone had confirmed the wire had cleared.
"To Lichtenstein," Burton said, pouring. He looked at Chuck with the particular warmth of a man who had just watched someone perform adequately and was choosing to interpret it as impressive. "You did well, kid. You proved something tonight."
"My German is a little rusty," Chuck said, "but I think—"
"I'm not talking about the German," Burton said. "I'm talking about the two of you." He gestured between Chuck and Sarah with his glass.
Chuck looked at Sarah. Sarah looked at Chuck. Something passed between them that wasn't quite a smile and was better than one.
Burton produced a cigar from his jacket and tucked it into Casey's breast pocket. "For later. Victory cigar. You've earned it, police face."
Casey looked down at his pocket with the expression of a man who had just received something he wasn't sure how to hold. "Thank you," he said, with slightly more warmth than usual.
"You were excellent," Burton said, pulling Sarah into a hug. "Both of us were excellent. The family business, alive and well."
"I'll get ice," Burton said, taking the bucket from the table. He went through the door.
Simon watched him go.
He drank some champagne and said nothing for a moment.
"Anyone else notice that went very smoothly?" he said.
Veronica looked up from her phone. "That's usually a good thing."
"Not always," Simon said.
"Relax," Casey said. "Not every operation ends in a firefight."
Casey's phone rang.
He looked at the screen. "Beckman." He answered, listened, and said very little. His expression was the one it had when the news being received required a recalibration.
He lowered the phone.
"The wire didn't go to our account," he said.
The room went quiet in the specific way of people processing information that explained something they'd been about to celebrate.
Sarah was out the door in four seconds.
Chuck went to his laptop. He opened it. He looked at it. He closed it.
"The laptop's gone," he said.
Casey reached into his breast pocket.
"The cigar is also gone," Casey said.
Simon drank the rest of his champagne.
"I did say it went too smoothly," he said.
Burton had switched the account number at some point during the operation — either before the transfer was initiated or during it, with access to equipment he'd lifted from the room while everyone else was focused on the celebration. The money had gone somewhere other than the CIA's designated account. The laptop that held the transaction records was gone. The cigar that had briefly occupied Casey's breast pocket was gone.
The man was a professional.
Simon looked at Sarah, who had come back into the room with the specific expression of someone who had known their father was capable of this and had chosen to believe the present situation would be different.
He said nothing, because there wasn't anything useful to say.
The Buy More the next morning.
Morgan found Simon near the entrance before Simon had been in the building for a full minute.
"You look great today," Morgan said. "Has anyone told you that? Seriously, the whole — the look—"
"Morgan," Simon said.
"Right. Okay. Can I borrow some money?"
"How much?"
Morgan looked at the ceiling. "Twenty-five hundred. Give or take."
Simon looked at him.
"Give or take on the side of give," Morgan clarified. "Devon is going to end me if I don't cover my share of the catering deposit by Friday."
"How are you paying it back?"
"I'm selling my car," Morgan said. "And I'm picking up extra shifts. I've already cleared it with Lester, who was very understanding about it in a condescending way."
"I'll write you a check," Simon said. He pulled the company checkbook from his jacket — the one with the C.P. Corporation pre-printed on the header, personal stamp already applied. He wrote twenty-five hundred, signed it, tore it out.
Morgan took it with both hands and held it the way people held things they badly needed.
"You're a gentleman," Morgan said. "And a scholar. And a person of excellent character—"
"One month," Simon said. "No interest if it's back in thirty days. After thirty, one point two percent per week, compounding. After sixty, add another point two percent per week."
"That's very specific," Morgan said.
"That's how lending works," Simon said. "The specificity is the point."
"Thirty days," Morgan said. "I swear. On everything."
He walked away looking at the check the way people looked at things that had solved an immediate problem while creating a medium-term one.
Simon watched him go and then saw Casey coming through the back entrance at a pace that suggested the morning had already developed complications.
"Walker?" Casey said, before he reached Simon.
"Haven't seen her."
"Burton's been taken," Casey said. "I think it's Amando's people."
Simon processed this. "If Amando got the money and Burton can't produce the building transfer—"
"They'll kill him," Casey said. "Yes. We need to find Walker before she does something unilateral."
"Chuck would know—"
"Already found him," Casey said. He was scanning the floor. "Bartowski."
Chuck appeared from the Nerd Herd area. "What's wrong?"
"Sarah," Casey said. "Have you seen her?"
"She left about twenty minutes ago," Chuck said. "She had two duffel bags. Both of them—" He gestured to indicate weight. "Heavy. And she had her backup piece, not her service weapon."
Simon and Casey exchanged a look.
They went for the door.
"Where are you going?" Chuck called.
"Personal matter," they said, at the same time, and kept walking.
The base under the yogurt shop confirmed it. Sarah had accessed the armory before leaving — not the standard field kit, but a more substantial selection. She had a destination and she'd equipped for it before going.
Casey pulled up the tracker application on the operations terminal.
"She's mobile," he said. "Moving south, then east. She's been running for twenty minutes."
"My car or yours?" Simon said.
"Mine. Follow close."
They picked up the signal on the freeway and followed it south out of Burbank, then east through the city's sprawl, and eventually into the outer geography of industrial Los Angeles — warehouses, logistics facilities, the wide flat spaces of a city that most tourists never saw.
The signal stopped.
An outdoor parking facility, mid-sized, poorly lit at the edges.
They pulled in at the south entrance.
Simon could see Sarah across the lot — two black duffel bags at her feet, standing in the open, waiting. The posture of someone who had arranged a meeting rather than stumbled into one.
Simon got out and went to the trunk.
The rifle case was where he always kept it. He assembled it in two minutes flat, checked the scope's zero against a reference point at the far end of the lot, and stood up.
"I'll take the high ground," he said. "There's a platform on the roof of the logistics building at the north end. Forty-degree angle on the center of the lot."
Casey looked at the building, did the geometry, and nodded. "Go."
Simon started moving toward the building's exterior access ladder.
Behind him, he heard the sound of a car entering from the north entrance — an older vehicle, distinctive in the way that well-maintained old cars were distinctive. A DeLorean, from the sound of the door.
He turned.
Casey had turned too. And Casey, in the dim light of the parking lot, was smiling. Not broadly — Casey didn't do broad — but the specific smile of a man who had just recognized something.
"Hold on," Casey said. "Let's see what Bartowski brought us."
Simon looked at the DeLorean.
Chuck climbed out, straightened his jacket, and looked around the lot with the compressed focus of someone who had made a decision on the way here and hadn't quite processed the full dimensions of it yet.
"We're waiting?" Simon said.
"We're watching," Casey said. "For thirty seconds."
Simon watched Chuck assess the lot, locate Sarah, and walk toward her with the specific gait of a man who had decided to be somewhere and was being there.
"Thirty seconds," Simon said.
"Give him a minute," Casey said.
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