AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“No. We took the small box truck and it’s full. We were dropping off, not picking up.”
“Okay. Call Yvgeny and tell him to get another truck over there, right now. Tell himright now. I want those boxes loaded and out of there in two hours. Tell him to put the truck somewhere secure, but leave the boxes on the truck. We’ll move them to the port tomorrow. Do not touch that 3M tape. Leave it right where it is, I want to look at it. We still got those bottles of Mr. Clean?”
“Sure, and a box of them paper rags. You want us to start wiping the place down?”
“Yes. Anything anyone might have touched.”
“You coming down here?”
“I’ll be there in an hour.” Step hung up and dialed a new number. When a man answered, he said, “This is me. I need you to get some of your people down to Long Beach. I need to know if anyone is watching the place. Be careful... Yeah, right now.”
Victoria Stepashin dropped out of her plank and asked, “Somebody fuck something up?”
“Somebody’s always fucking something up,” Step said. One hand went to his mouth and squeezed. “The security guard is gone and so are twelve boxes of those new Intel chips, the five-point-fives. There’s a question of whether he took off or was taken off.”
“Twelve boxes, that’s... one million, nine hundred and twenty thousand dollars delivered in Chongjin,” Victoria said, doing the math in her head. “If he took off with twelve boxes, you’re gonna have to cut his nuts off.”
“I will, if he took off. The way Alan’s talking... It might be something else.”
“Alan’s a moron.”
“Not about this,” Step said. “Not about counting boxes.”
“How many boxes are left?” Victoria asked.
“Richard says one hundred and sixty-eight.”
“Think the FBI might have grabbed them?”
Step shook his head. “Doesn’t seem like it. Why would the FBI take twelve boxes? They’d take them all and have a press conference.”
“They were all over us at Ventura...”
“Yeah. Something’s happening and we don’t know what it is.”
“Better find out,” Victoria said. “If there’s one hundred and sixty-eight boxes left, that’s still...” It took her five seconds... “twenty-six million, eight hundred and eighty thousand dollars.”
“I’m on it,” Step said. “I hope it’s not about the other thing.”
“Something to worry about,” Victoria agreed. “You start mixing political shit with money shit, there’s a good chance you’re gonna get dropped in the shit.”
Theother thingwas the train-hacker problem. They’d promised people in Moscow that they’d handle it. The people they’d promised tended to get cranky if promises were broken. They were the kind of people whose unhappiness tended to becomeyourunhappiness, to say nothing of your screaming agony.
Step went out to the garage and rolled Victoria’s silver Mercedes SL550 down the driveway. Forty-five minutes later, he took a call. The man, whose name was Tom Boyadjian, said, “This is me. There’s nobody watching the place, not right now, unless they’re using a satellite. No drones in the area. But: somebody was down in that container yard and not long ago. They ate some cookies inside a container and dribbled some crumbs around. If the crumbs had been there more than a couple of hours, the mice would have eatenthem. So, it was a surveillance stand. The container had a perfect view of the front of the warehouse.”
“What’s on the cameras?”
“Nothing. The cameras were wiped,” Boyadjian said.
“You’re shitting me,” Step said. “Even the cloud?”
“Even the cloud.”
“That tells us something,” Step said. “Who could erase the cloud video and be interested in stealing high-end chips?”
“Yeah. Hackers. The train nerds,” Boyadjian said.
“Which means the train nerds know who we are. That’s a problem.”
