Дэвид Балдаччи - The Collectors

Stone’s musings were interrupted by the entrance of Alex Ford, a veteran Secret Service agent who’d played an instrumental role in helping the Camel Club in the past and been named an honorary member of the club for his heroics.

Ford stayed for half an hour and was relieved to find that Caleb would be okay.

He said, “Take care of yourself, Caleb. And call me if you need anything.”

“How are things at WFO?” Stone asked him, referring to the Service’s Washington Field Office.

“Way too busy. The criminal elements have kicked it into overdrive.”

“Well, I hope you’ve recovered fully from our little adventure.”

“I don’t call a potential global apocalypse a little adventure. And I don’t think I’ll ever fully recover.”

After Alex Ford had left, Caleb turned to the others. “It was truly horrible,” he said. “There he was just lying on the floor.”

“And you fainted?” Stone asked, his gaze fixed on his friend.

“I must have. I remember turning the corner, looking for my sweater, and there he was. God, I almost stumbled over him. I saw his eyes. My mind went blank. My chest tightened. I felt so cold. I thought I was having a heart attack. And then I just passed out.”

Reuben put a hand on Caleb’s shoulder. “A lot of people would’ve fainted.”

Milton piped in, “The National Psychiatric Foundation reports that finding a dead body ranks as the second most traumatic event a human being can experience.”

Reuben raised his eyebrows at this comment. He said, “What’s the number one traumatic experience? Finding your spouse in bed with a monkey holding a can of expired Cheez Whiz?”

“Did you know DeHaven well?” Stone asked Caleb.

“Yes. It’s tragic, really. He was in excellent shape. He’d just had a complete cardio workup at Hopkins. But I guess anyone can have a heart attack.”

“Is that what it was, a heart attack?” Stone said.

Caleb looked uncertain. “What else could it be? Or a stroke perhaps?”

“Statistically speaking, it was probably a heart attack,” Milton added. “It’s the leading cause of so-called instant death in this country. In fact, any of us could drop at any moment and be dead before we hit the floor.”

“Damn, Milton,” Reuben retorted, “do you have to be so bloody cheerful?”

“Until the autopsy results come back we can only speculate,” Stone pointed out. “But you didn’t see anyone else in the vault area, did you?”

Caleb stared up at his friend. “No.”

“But you passed out pretty quickly, so you wouldn’t have necessarily noticed anyone else around on the fourth floor?”

“Oliver, you can’t get in the vault without using your pass card. And there’s a camera right there at the main door.”

Stone looked thoughtful. “First, the Speaker of the House is murdered, and now the director of the Rare Books Division dies under somewhat mysterious circumstances.”

Reuben eyed him warily. “I doubt terrorists are targeting book peddlers these days, so don’t work this into another grand conspiracy with the fate of the world in the balance. I can only take one Armageddon per month, thank you very much.”

Stone’s eyes twinkled. “We’ll table the issue for now until we know more.”

“I can give you a ride home, Caleb,” Reuben said. “I have my motorcycle.”

Reuben’s pride was his fully restored 1928 Indian motorcycle with the very rare left-hand sidecar.

“I don’t think I’m up to that, Reuben.” Caleb paused and added, “Frankly, that contraption of yours terrifies me.”

A nurse bustled in, took the patient’s vitals and stuck a temperature reader in Caleb’s left ear.

“Can I go home soon?” he asked.

She took the reader out and looked at it. “You’re almost up to normal. And yes, I think the doctor is preparing the discharge orders now.”

As arrangements were made for Caleb’s release, Stone drew Reuben aside.

“Let’s keep an eye on Caleb for a while.”

“Why? You think he’s really hurt?”

“I don’t want him to get hurt.”

“The guy died from a coronary, Oliver. It happens every day.”

“But probably not for someone who’d just been given a clean bill of health by Johns Hopkins.”

“Okay, so he popped a blood vessel or fell and cracked his skull. You heard Caleb: The guy was all alone in there.”

“As far as Caleb knows, he was, but he couldn’t possibly know for sure.”

“But the security camera and the pass card,” Reuben protested.

“All good points, and they may very well confirm that Jonathan DeHaven was alone when he died. But that still doesn’t prove he wasn’t killed.”

“Come on, who’d have a grudge against a librarian?” Reuben asked.

“Everyone has enemies. The only difference is for some people you just have to look harder to find them.”

“How’s it check out?” Leo Richter said into his phone headset as he punched in some numbers on the keypad. He sat in his car in front of a drive-through ATM in Beverly Hills. In a van parked across the street Tony Wallace, until recently a felonious boutique store clerk, examined the video feed on the screen in front of him. “Sweet. I’ve got a perfect frame of your fingers inputting the PIN. And I’ve got a tight shot of the face of the card going in. With the zoom and the freeze I can read everything on it.”

The night before, they had switched the metal box containing bank brochures that was bolted to the side of the ATM with a box of Tony’s manufacture. He’d earlier stolen a box from another ATM and built an exact replica in the garage of the rental house Annabelle had them staying at. Inside the fake brochure box, Tony had placed a battery-powered video camera with wireless feed pointed at the keypad and card slot for the ATM. The camera could send the picture up to two hundred meters away, well within range of the van.

As a backup they’d also placed a skimmer Tony had built over the ATM’s card slot. It was such a perfect replica that not even Annabelle could find fault with it. This device captured all the numbers on the cards, including the embedded verification code on the magnetic stripe, and fed them wirelessly to a receiver in the van.

Annabelle was sitting next to Tony. Across from her was Freddy Driscoll, who’d been plying his trade selling fake Gucci and Rolexes on the Santa Monica pier until he’d run into Annabelle and Leo. Freddy was manning another video camera aimed out the heavily tinted side window of the van.

“I’ve got a clear shot of the cars and license plates going through,” he reported.

“Okay, Leo,” Annabelle said into her headset. “Move out of the way and let the real money through.”

“You know,” Tony said, “we don’t really need the camera at the ATM because we’ve got the card skimmer. It’s redundant.”

“Transmission from the skimmer gets garbled sometimes,” Annabelle said, staring at the TV screen in front of her. “And you miss one number, the card’s useless. Plus, the camera gives us info the skimmer doesn’t. We’re only doing this once. No mistakes.”

Over the next two days they sat in the van as the ATM camera and skimmer captured debit and credit card information. Annabelle methodically matched this information with the cars and their license plates going through the ATM lane, loading it all on a laptop in a spreadsheet format. Annabelle was also prioritizing.

She said, “Bugatti Veyrons, Saleens, Paganis, Koenigseggs, Maybachs, Porsche Carrera GTs and Mercedes SLR McLarens get five stars. The Bugatti sells for one and a quarter million, and the others sell for between four and seven hundred thousand. Rolls-Royces, Bentleys and Aston Martins get four stars. Jags, BMWs, regular Mercedes get three stars.”