Outsourced

21

The two men were chained to a bar so that their arms were stretched over their heads and the tips of their toes barely able to touch the floor. The room they were in was soundproof, so there was no real reason for the gags in their mouths other than for the psychological effect and also to keep their screaming from giving Petrenko a headache. They were both animated now, both trying to make noise. Petrenko ignored them as he slipped on a butcher’s apron and then a set of goggles. He picked up a pair of latex gloves and pulled them over his hands, then stood clenching and unclenching his fists, making sure his fingers would have the flexibility to do what they’d need to. When he felt ready, he gave Yuri a nod.

Yuri and two other men unchained the heavyset Arab and carried him to a table that was wrapped in plastic. Plastic sheeting was also laid out under the table covering a good area of the floor. After a night chained in the position he had been, the man would have no strength in his arms, no ability to fight back. Yuri and the two other Russians dumped the Arab on the table like he was a sack of flour and then handcuffed his wrists and ankles to metal rings at both ends of the table. Petrenko picked up a scalpel and held it to the light.

The other man, the one named Abbas, tried to scream through his gag when he caught sight of the scalpel, his body contorting wildly. Petrenko shook his head sadly at the man and addressed him as if he were addressing a child.

“There’s no point in acting this way,” Petrenko told him. “You are going to die later today. Nothing you do will change that. Whether you die easily or not will be up to how long it takes you to tell me where my money is. And you will tell me. Believe me, you will be begging to tell me.”

Abbas was nearly epileptic as he tried to make a noise through his gag.

“You don’t understand,” Petrenko said. “I don’t care what you might have to say now. After you watch what happens to your friend, then I will care.”

He turned away from Abbas and walked over to the heavyset Arab handcuffed to the table. The man’s eyes grew wide as he saw the scalpel. He tried frantically to talk through his gag. In his panic he started choking on it. Petrenko couldn’t afford to let him die so quickly. He had no choice but to remove the gag.

“Please,” the man was saying as he gasped for air, tears streaming down his face. “I will tell you anything you want to know, anything…”

Petrenko in Russian asked Yuri to get him some cotton. He waited patiently for Yuri, all the while listening to the heavyset man blabber on and on about how he would tell Petrenko anything he needed to know. When Yuri returned with a bag of cotton, Petrenko tore off two pieces and stuffed them in each ear. Otherwise, he knew, this man would give him a headache.

The heavyset man’s voice was now barely a hoarse whisper; still though trying repeatedly to convince Petrenko that he would tell him anything he wanted to know.

Petrenko stopped him. “Unfortunately for you,” he said, “you have nothing to say that I care to hear.” Then pushing the edge of the scalpel against the man’s bare chest, he went to work.

Joel had been on the road for five hours before he arrived in Manhattan. The first thing he did was stop off for an onion bagel with cream cheese. Closing his eyes, he savored every bite of it. Back in New England the bagels were dreck, nothing but glorified rolls. After he finished it, he bought another one. He’d have no problem eating a dozen of them in one sitting, but he would have to limit himself to two. His waistline couldn’t afford more than that. As it was, he was going to have to pay later by doing several hundred sit-ups when he got home.

After his lunch, he headed over to Forty-Seventh Street and found the jewelry store his uncle Hyman worked at. Entering the store, he spotted his uncle, sitting on the same stool he had sat on for over fifty years. Eighty-two years old, half a foot shorter than Joel, with only a few white wisps of hair left on his mostly bald head. Along with his big ears and large veined nose, he looked like some gnarled figure that could’ve been carved out of wood instead of flesh. The old man did a double-take when he saw Joel. Sliding off his stool, he moved with a surprising quickness to meet his nephew.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. He took hold of one of Joel’s hands with both of his, his own hands thick and swollen. “I haven’t heard from you in three years and you just pop in here, just like that. What’s wrong with you, you can’t call first?”

“I’m sorry, Uncle Hymie, but I decided kind of spur of the moment to drive down here. I’ve got something I’d like to show you.”

“Eh, that can wait. You have lunch yet?”

“Yeah, I had a couple of bagels.”

“Bagels? You call that lunch? Let me take you to a deli, get you a nice brisket sandwich. Maybe some matzoh ball soup?”

“I don’t have time for that now, but I plan on stopping off at the Carnegie and taking a few pounds of pastrami and corned beef home with me. Also a bag of potato knishes. Can I show you what I got?”

“Always in a rush.” The old man shook his head, making a tsking noise. “You haven’t seen me in three years and you can’t even spend time to have lunch with me.”

“All right, if you’re going to make a federal case out of it-”

“Never mind, you’re in too big a hurry. What do you have that’s so important for me to look at?”

“Can we go to the back room?” Joel lowered his voice to a whisper. “I’d like a little privacy.”

The old man eyed his nephew suspiciously. “Did you do something to get yourself in trouble?” he asked.

“No, of course not,” Joel muttered, indignant, his voice still barely above a whisper. “I’d just like a little privacy, that’s all, I don’t need everyone in this store gawking at what I want to show you.”

There were only half a dozen other people in the store, none of them paying Joel or his uncle any attention. The old man shrugged and led Joel to the back of the store and into a small room that was only slightly bigger than a closet.

“So what do you have?” his uncle asked, now showing a little curiosity.

Joel took a silk pouch from his pocket and emptied a diamond into his hand. His uncle took the diamond from him, studied it and then looked back at his nephew.

“What are you doing with an uncut diamond?” he asked.

“Let’s just say I found it.”

“Tell me the truth. Did you steal this?”

Joel made a face. “Of course not,” he said. “Come on, Uncle Hymie, just tell me what it’s worth, okay?”

The old man stuck a magnifying glass in his eye and studied the diamond. “This is very good quality.” He popped the glass out of his eye and held the diamond in his open palm. “Two and one quarter carats.” He gave his nephew a long, careful look. “Retail, this would go for twenty-two thousand, wholesale, fourteen thousand. If you were someone off the street, I could probably get you nine for it. You, if I forgo my commission, twelve. Do you want to sell?”

Joel rubbed a hand along his jaw as he did the math in his head and realized that he had over a million dollars in diamonds. “Not right now,” he said. “Maybe in a little while. What if I’m able to get my hands on more diamonds like this?”

“How many more?”

“Fifty, a hundred, I don’t know yet. How many would you be able to buy?”

“Joel, what did you do?”

“Nothing. This is all above board. So tell me, Uncle Hymie, how many diamonds like these would you be able to take off my hands?”

“Everything is so above board that you had to show me this diamond in private, eh?” The old man sighed heavily. “But, I guess if not me, you’ll get yourself in trouble with someone else.”

“Look, Uncle Hymie, I’m not in the mood for a lecture. How many diamonds like these can you buy?”

“Gott im Himmel,” the old man muttered to himself, then to Joel as he smiled wistfully, “Uncut, this quality, as many as you have.”

When Dan was brought into Craig Brown’s office, the bank manager introduced him to Alex Resnick, telling him that Resnick was a Lynn police detective investigating the bank robbery. Dan shook hands with the man and sat down.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Brown was saying, “but the detective is also trying to find out why our security system didn’t work. You won’t mind answering a few of his questions?”

“Of course not,” Dan said. As he smiled at Brown, he thought, You sneaky underhanded little prick, trying to waylay me like this. Goddamn sneaky underhanded bastard.

“Any idea what happened?” Resnick asked.

“Off the top of my head, maybe a couple of ideas.” Dan then turned to Brown. “Have you tested the system since the robbery?”

“Of course. We tested each alarm button. They all worked.”

“How about the system status?”

“What does that tell you?” Resnick asked.

Dan gave the detective a thin smile. “How long the system has been up and running. If the system was turned off before the robbery, we’ll be able to tell that.”

Brown made a show of looking through a stack of papers. “I don’t think I’ve gotten around to checking that yet,” he said.

“We’re wasting our time until we do,” Dan said, trying to keep his tone pleasant, all the while his mind spinning while he tried to figure out how he was going to handle this. He had known he was going to have to talk to the cops at some point, but he hadn’t expected it this quickly.

That little prick, he thought as he followed Brown out of the office. Goddamn underhanded little prick!

For a moment Dan daydreamed that he had pistol-whipped the bank manager when he’d had the opportunity. It had taken quite a bit of self-control on his part to only shove Brown the other day. He didn’t like the man – and this was even before Brown made the decision to farm out the software to India – and he resented the condescending comments Brown made to him afterwards.

“You don’t need this type of work,” Brown had told him. “After all, haven’t you made millions already in high tech? From what I’ve read, anyone who’s any good has.”

And…

“I don’t understand why you would want this – isn’t this only menial work? Anyway, I can’t justify paying you fifty dollars an hour when I can hire four Indian programmers for the same price.”

There were other jabs, many others. All made with a smug little smile.

When they got to the security system, Dan moved Brown aside so he could type in a command at the system’s console. He showed Resnick the response which indicated that the system had been up and running continuously for over thirty-four days.

“Too bad,” Dan told the detective. “This would have made things easy if someone had simply turned the system off before the robbery.”

“Could someone have hacked into it?” Resnick asked.

“Not if the system was built the way I designed it.”

“It was built exactly to your design,” Brown interjected, his tone defensive.

“If that’s true, then the system will only allow outgoing calls. No one can connect into it.”

“I’m not sure I understood something you said. What do you mean if the system was built the way you designed it?” Resnick asked.

“I had nothing to do with the implementation, only the design.” Dan grimaced as he straightened up. “I’m getting too old to crouch like this,” he said. “My knees can’t take it. What do you say we head back to Craig’s office?”

Resnick was frowning. “Anything you can tell by looking at it?”

“No. If it wasn’t turned off, then there are only two possibilities I can think of. Number one, no one pushed the alarm buttons during the robbery-”

“That’s ridiculous,” Brown interrupted. He was trying to appear indignant, but his act fell flat. He knew the FBI agent had suspected that and the accusation weighed heavily on him. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t muster up any genuine indignation.

“Well then, the only other explanation I can think of is that a backdoor was put into the software.”

“What do you mean by a backdoor?” Resnick asked.

“One or more of the programmers built in a way to make the system fail-”

“That’s preposterous!”

Dan turned to Brown, his affable grin hardening. “No, it isn’t. What’s preposterous is you having some firm halfway around the world building critical security software for you because they’re the cheapest ones you could find.”

“There was nothing wrong with what we did,” Brown insisted. He cleared his throat. “Would you be able to examine the software and figure out why it failed?”

“Sure, I could do that. Two hundred dollars an hour, one hundred and sixty hours guaranteed. Paid in advance.”

Brown’s head jerked as if he’d been sucker punched. “That’s r-ridiculous,” he sputtered. “We only paid you fifty dollars an hour to design the system!”

“If you don’t like my price I’m sure you could always offer it to the lowest bidder. Maybe that same firm in India who you had build the code. I’m sure for two hundred dollars an hour, they’d be able to get twenty people.”

Dan stared evenly at the bank manager. Brown blinked several times before looking away. “I think we’ll need to talk to other firms,” he said gruffly.

“That’s your choice, although I’d have to think you’d want to resolve this as quickly as possible. I’d also think you’d want the guy who designed the system to be the one looking at the code. But if you don’t care about the public relations aspect of this, that’s your business.” Then to Resnick, “Any more questions, Detective, before I leave?”

“Not right now. I’ll need a number where you can be reached.”

Dan handed Resnick a business card. “This has my home and cell numbers.” As he turned to leave, Brown stopped him.

“I’ll get you a check.” Brown met Dan’s eyes briefly and then lowered his gaze. “How quickly can you start on this?” he asked.

“Right away. I’ll need the full amount up front.”

Brown nodded. “Give me a minute,” he said. After he locked up the security system, he started towards his office. Dan was going to follow him, but Resnick stopped him. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to you alone,” he said.

“Sure.” Dan maintained his pleasant smile. He was amazed at how calm he was able to appear. In reality it was more of a numbness. Almost as if he were on autopilot, reacting without any thought or plan. But still, no perspiration, no heart palpitations, nothing but a flat evenness.

Brown wavered as if he wanted to eavesdrop on the conversation. Reluctantly, he kept walking. After he was out of sight, Resnick asked Dan what he thought. “Could Brown be involved in this?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think he’d have the balls to try something like this. It’s a nice thought, though.”

“You don’t like him much, do you?”

“No, not much. I warned him about the dangers of sending out this type of code to a place where there would be no oversight and he ignored me. I even offered to do the work at a discount.” Dan paused, his amiable smile fading. “I don’t want to appear insensitive,” he added. “I know people were killed during this robbery, but this thing really fucked me over too. I make my living designing security systems. Who’s going to want to hire me after this? All because some incompetent bank manager wouldn’t take my advice.”

“Are people going to know you worked on this security system?”

“Yeah, it’s a small industry, word gets around. Plus I’ve got dozens of resumes circulating now that mention this last contract.”

Dan stopped and let his smile drop completely. “What you asked before about Brown being involved – there is something that seemed odd to me. In my original proposal I had a backup line that would’ve been tied directly to the alarm buttons and would bypass the security system. This way if the system was down for any reason, the police would still be called if any of the buttons were activated. Brown got rid of it. The damn thing would’ve only cost about three hundred dollars a month. I just assumed he made his decision out of shortsightedness, but who knows?”

Dan spotted the bank manager walking towards them. As Brown handed him a check, he made a lame joke about how the bank was being robbed for the second time in two days. Dan noticed that Resnick was looking at Brown differently now, more intensely, and Brown seemed to notice it also, his smug little smile quickly growing strained. Dan told the bank manager that he’d be calling him as soon as he found something and then shook hands with Resnick, who thanked him for his time.

As Dan walked through the bank lobby, sights from the other day rushed through his mind. The dead girl, the other one squirming along the floor, all that blood leaking out of them. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to rid his mind of those images. Stepping outside, the numbness he’d been feeling was gone. A tight fist squeezed his heart. His knees buckled.

Damn, it would be something if I passed out right here. What the hell would that cop think?

Somehow he stayed on his feet. Staggering, he made it back to his car, amazed that he had been able to pull off talking to that cop. But as he’d been noticing with Carol, lying just keeps on getting easier.

Petrenko pulled the latex gloves from his hands and dropped them into a garbage bag. Grimacing, he grabbed his fingers and rubbed them vigorously. It had been a grueling four hours.

“He didn’t know anything,” Petrenko said.

“No, I don’t believe so,” Yuri agreed.

“We have lost a lot so far,” Petrenko noted bitterly. “Not only what was stolen yesterday, but all the potential millions we could’ve gained in future diamond purchases.” He stopped for a moment to rub his eyes. “We’ll find them. Sooner or later I’ll get my hands on them and they’ll suffer worse than these Arabs did.”

Petrenko gazed off into the distance, his expression turning somber. Slowly, he looked back at Yuri. “We’ll offer a reward,” he said at last. “If any diamond dealers have come across uncut diamonds, we’ll find out about it. Take care of it.”

Yuri nodded and left the room.

Petrenko glared at the two other Russian men working for him. “Why are you two standing there?” he demanded. He waved a hand in the general direction of where the remains of the dead Arabs lay. “Take care of this mess!”