Burn (Michael Bennett 7)

I was getting concerned. Surveillances, with all the overtime, were quite expensive, and the one thing I didn’t need any more of was egg on my face.

“Hey, Mike, check this out,” Arturo whispered from the corner where he was working the camera.

“What is it?” I said, rushing over to see that he had the camera trained on two tall, attractive, well-dressed young blond women hurrying across Fifth.

“Man, look at them! Look how tall they are, and they’re like superrich and so hot! They’re models, right? They have to be.”

“I think you’re right, Arturo,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Why don’t you hop out and ask for their numbers? Show them the badge. You know, lay down some of that famous Latin charm on them.”

Lopez looked up hopefully. Then he frowned.

“Yeah, right. In my dreams. They’re wooml.”

“Wooml?”

“Way out of my league.”

“In that case, how about you keep the damn camera focused on the store where it belongs,” I said as I plopped down on the camp chair behind him and cracked open a Red Bull. “I vouched for you on this gig, Arturo. The least you could do is pretend you’ve been below Ninety-Sixth Street before.”

I pressed my push-to-talk radio.

“Hey, how are things with you guys?” I called to Brooklyn and Robertson, stationed ten blocks south down Fifth Avenue in the Forty-Seventh Street Diamond District.

“Same as they were when you asked us five minutes ago,” Brooklyn radioed back. “So far, so quiet. Not to mention that Robertson just came back with coffee and forgot the diamond necklace I asked him to buy me. Imagine, and I thought we were partners.”

“Stay on your toes, Brooklyn. Don’t forget these guys used guns last time. Who knows what they have planned now.”

“Don’t worry, boss,” Brooklyn said as I stared into the screen at the waves of people crisscrossing back and forth in front of Tiffany’s doors.

“We got everything wired tight.”

CHAPTER 90

HONCHO, IN BAGGY BLUE Rockefeller Center maintenance coveralls, was sweeping some peanut shells and a cracked plastic spork out of the gutter outside the Five Guys across from the NBC studios on Forty-Eighth when he received the one-word text message.

Ready

He pocketed his phone and dropped the broom and dustpan into a wheeled garbage can on the sidewalk and immediately rolled it under the archway of a midblock pedestrian corridor beside Five Guys that cut straight through to Forty-Seventh Street. Thirty seconds later, he stepped out of the tunnel.

And took a breath.

He almost couldn’t believe it. Eighteen months of meticulous planning, and now it was actually happening. The final job was actually going down.

He was smack-dab in the center of the bustling Diamond District.

He stood for a moment, soaking in what some called the Wall Street of Diamonds. Lining both sides of the two-and-a-half-football-fields-long block were diamond shop after diamond shop, where stones changed hands to the tune of four hundred million dollars a day. Instead of being glitzy like the two jewelry stores he’d recently robbed, the closely packed stores seemed utilitarian, almost grimy.

Honcho pulled up the sleeve of his coveralls and checked his watch. He swiped a drop of sweat from the back of his neck.

T minus three minutes and counting, he thought, taking another ragged breath. Counting to what, though? That was the question.

He moved north up the sidewalk, pushing the garbage can alongside a Ryder Eurovan, a Brink’s armored truck, a UPS truck, and a FedEx truck, then two more huge armored vans. The vans were from none other than Malca-Amit, the premier international diamond-shuttling security firm based in Israel, which transported diamonds between the major diamond hubs of Tel Aviv and Antwerp and Mumbai and New York City.

On the sidewalk beside the trucks were scores of tourists and armored car guards and merchants. Most of the merchants, Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, were the descendants of the Jewish Europeans who had fled Antwerp for the United States after 1940, when Hitler invaded Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, Honcho knew. There was little about the block that he didn’t know, having cased it for almost the last two years.

Honcho was rolling the can past a kneeling bike messenger chaining his ride to the pedestal of a phoneless phone kiosk when he spotted the sketchy gray work van with tinted windows across the street.

What the hell? he thought, eyeing it.