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“You just gonna leave me on the floor?” Hewitt asked.
“No. Here’s what we’re gonna do, George,” Letty said. “We’re gonna take a few of these boxes with us. Then I’m going to cut one of your hands free, but not your feet or arms or legs. I’ll leave you the box cutter so you can cut yourself loose. That’ll give us time to get out of here. Then you better lock the door, get in that truck and get your ass out of California, as fast as you can. The guys you’re working with have killed a lot of people and you’d be nothing to them. They’d cut your head off for looking at them wrong. You got all that?”
Hewitt’s oversized Adam’s apple bobbed a few times, and he said, eventually, “Yeah. Yeah. Make sure you get my hand free. I’ll get the fuck out. I kinda knew... I’m just a security guard...”
Cartwright had stepped over to a gray metal box hung on asidewall. It was locked, but she took a skeletal Leatherman out of her pocket, selected a tool, and broke the lock open. Inside was a mass of wires and a hard drive. On the inside of the cover was an instruction list on restarting the drive, and the name, address, and phone number for the security company.
Letty called Nowak and asked if she could kill the cameras and wipe the video, and Nowak said she could, but it might take a while.
“That’s fine. We won’t be out of here for ten or fifteen minutes.”
When Letty finished with Nowak, Cartwright was looking at the stacks of boxes. “How do you want to do this?”
“Take a few boxes at random, trying to keep the stacks looking about the same,” Letty said. “There must be a couple hundred boxes here. Maybe they won’t notice right away. And maybe they won’t all be the same chip, so we should take boxes from different areas...”
They could get six boxes in the short-bed pickup, under the cover, even with the drum set inside. They moved the boxes to the front door, and waited for Baxter, who showed up in exactly five minutes. While Baxter and Cartwright loaded the boxes, Letty cut one of Hewitt’s hands loose and put the box cutter on the floor twenty feet away, where he could roll over to it.
“George, I was serious about what I said,” Letty told him. “They’re gonna kill you. You gotta get out and hide from these fuckers.”
Hewitt nodded and said, “I’ll go.” And as Letty headed for the front door, he said, “You girls be careful. You’re too young for this shit.”
Letty got in the front passenger seat of the truck, and told Baxter, “Get as far away as you can, where we can still see the front door. I want to see if George actually gets out of here.”
They waited fifteen minutes, then Hewitt came out the door. Satisfied that he was alone, he loaded a half-dozen of the chip boxes into his truck, locked the warehouse door, jumped in the truck and took off.
Letty called their traffic-tracking number at the NSA and gave the man who answered the license plate number on the back of the truck, and its location. A minute later, the man said, “We got it.”
“Stay with it,” Letty said. “We want to know if he gets out of LA.”
Fifteen
Arseny Stepashin was sitting in his TV room watching a Golden State Warriors basketball game while his wife lay on a yoga mat behind the couch, doing crunches, grunting with each one.
When his cell phone rang, he couldn’t find it for a moment, then fished it out from the crack between seat cushions, looked at the caller’s name, and said, “Da?”
“Mr. Step—we maybe got a problem at the warehouse.” The caller was an American named Alan Greens; he knew very little Russian, but was reliable, because Step knew where Greens’s bodies were buried, the bodies being literal.
Step sighed and asked, “What’s the problem?”
“Well, when me’n Richard got here, George was gone. Door was locked, but his truck was gone and he was gone. We went inside and everything looked kinda okay except there was a bunch of3M tape on the warehouse floor. I mean, like it was pulled off somebody. Like, there was arm hairs stuck in some of the tape.”
“What about the shipment?”
“I dunno. It don’t look right, but maybe... I dunno, maybe it’s okay,” Greens said. “There’s lots of boxes, Richard is counting them, but I don’t know how many there was supposed to be.”
“Let me go look,” Step said. “Hold on.”
Step lived in Beverly Hills—not in the Hills themselves, but down in the Flats—in a Spanish Revival house. The house was nice but wasn’t ostentatious by Beverly Hills standards and did have that 90210 zip code, which carried some weight back in Moscow.
He walked down a Mexican-tiled hallway to his home office, lit up his laptop, went to an encrypted file, typed in a fifteen-place password, and ran a finger down a spreadsheet. One hundred and eighty.
There should be one hundred and eighty boxes of advanced Intel chips stacked in the warehouse, ready to go on a South Korean ship that was actually a North Korean ship, but that was registered in Panama and legally owned by a Nigerian business family through a Cayman Islands front. Like the house, the ship was rented.
Step shut down the computer and walked back to the TV room, where his wife was frozen in a plank and was counting breaths, a breath equaling three seconds. She had fifteen percent body fat, which would be good for a gymnast, and she could hold a plank for five minutes. He picked up his phone and said, “Al? One hundred and eighty, exactly.”
He heard Greens say to Richard, “You sure? You better be sure. Okay, I’ll tell him.” Then, “Richard says one hundred and sixty-eight. Exactly. He counted twice.”
Step scratched his neck, looked at the ceiling, then asked, “You got enough space on your truck to load them up?”
