Payback

7

Rubens looked at the large screen at the front of the Art Room, where a diagram of the bank’s interior gave Lia’s and Dean’s locations inside the bank. To the right of this were four small panels showing video feeds from the surveillance cameras.

“The election official who asked Lia what she was doing — do we know who he is?”

“Schoolteacher from Tarapoto, north of the country.”

“Does he have a link to Ortez?”

“No.”

“You’re positive?”

“Everybody in the bank has been checked pretty carefully, Mr. Rubens.”

“Check him again,” said Rubens, walking toward the screen. “Is Lia out of direct communication inside the vault?” Rubens asked.

“The vault walls and ceiling interfere,” said Rockman. “It’s like being deep inside a bunker. We can hear her through the directional booster Dean brought in, but we can’t talk to her directly. We needed the bandwidth to transmit the data into her laptop.”

Rubens folded his arms in front of his chest.

“Did you want me to pass something along?” Rockman asked Rubens.

“That won’t be necessary,” said Rubens. “Mr. Karr is outside the bank?”

“A block away. Charlie’s pretense for being in the lobby is that he’s opening a bank account. If Charlie is called, Karr will come inside and take his place.”

“Are we ready to map the cards?”

“Everybody’s standing by.”

Rubens glanced toward the back of the Art Room, where the team’s specialists were gathered at their own monitors. The actual work of mapping the cards and envelopes would be done in another part of the large complex, then transmitted back.

“I don’t think Lia will have any problem,” volunteered Rockman. “She’s recovered from that business in Korea.”

“That business in Korea, Mr. Rockman, is not the sort of thing that one recovers from.”