Aurora(32)
Sure, you could look. You could pick up stories that your friends wouldn’t believe, if you hadn’t signed an NDA and could actually tell them. Or you could, as Brady and innumerable others in his position often did, lie awake at night occasionally, dreaming that the wise and kind billionaire, their wise and kind billionaire, would die unexpectedly, leaving you lavishly remembered in their will. Brady knew of no specific examples of sudden billionaire death and excessive employee inheritance, but that didn’t stop a person from hoping.
Mostly, though, Brady just did his job, as his father had taught him to. He performed the tasks that were required, he did them all the way, and he left no mess for anyone else to clean up afterwards. To Brady’s mind, driving a quarter million dollars in cash across the country to deliver to Thom’s sister was no different from cleaning out the garage when he was a kid. Make sure everything ends up at the curb, tightly bundled in black trash bags. Leave it broom-clean.
Same thing here. Deliver the money safely, wish the lady well, and return.
And let no one stop you from doing your job.
Once or twice over the years, Thom had made unseemly requests; he’d asked Brady to do jobs that were not the sort of thing that could be talked about in polite company. Or anywhere, for that matter, except perhaps in the confessional. There were payoffs, of course, and in the past couple years there had been mild intimidations that he was asked to perform. His size made it easy, and most of the time they had it coming. On those occasions Brady had made certain to tidy up his eternal soul afterwards.
After he’d said his goodbyes to his mother and brother, an emotionless experience Brady was used to by now, he went directly to Thom’s house. He was waved through the gate by security—how long would those guys stick around if this thing lasted as long as he’d heard it would, Brady wondered—and went to the massive garage. He had no intention of making a cross-country drive in a gas guzzling Chevy Suburban, no matter how comfortably tricked out it was. Gasoline itself was going to be a major problem, as would finding an open recharging station for an electric car. He needed to have both capacities and knew the exact car he wanted from Thom’s fleet.
The black BMW X5 hybrid had a twenty-four-kilowatt-hour battery that could return up to fifty-four miles on a single charge, as well as a three-liter turbocharged gasoline engine that added another three to four hundred miles to its range. There was a spare battery in the trunk, kept fully charged and rotated three times a year, and a lead-lined spare fuel tank that had been custom-built into the wheel wells, with its line running beneath a false floor of the trunk. The modifications didn’t leave much in the way of trunk space, but as an emergency vehicle built for crisis evacuations, it was ideal. The combined reach of the car, without any refueling or recharging, was nearly seven hundred miles, if you knew how to change a battery. Which Brady most certainly did. He would need to gas up exactly once, which he would do halfway through the 781-mile drive to Utah, at the refueling station they’d established near Battle Mountain, Nevada. Stopping was a risk he was prepared to take. Go get the cash first, then figure out how to get to Illinois with it and not get robbed or killed in the process.
Brady reached into the Suburban and removed the Saint Christopher medal he kept hanging from the rearview mirror. He’d wound it tightly so as to attract no attention from the boss, and it took him a minute to get it free now. But he wasn’t leaving without it. Christopher was the patron saint of travelers in general and motorists in particular, and he had some serious motoring to do.
Medallion in hand, he turned to the BMW, opened the driver’s door, tossed his lightweight gym bag in the back seat, and slid behind the wheel. The leather crunched in a pleasing manner. Brady had tried hard to get Thom’s attention regarding this car, which was, after all, the ultimate go-car, and he hoped some of it had gotten through.
Because this fucking BMW was where it was at.
Brady lifted the lid on the storage compartment between the two front seats, revealing a lock with a three-digit tumbler. He spun the digits to 0-4-4—Mr. Banning’s personal choice for the code—and opened the MicroVault gun safe he’d had installed. He pulled the Glock G23 from its sleeve inside the vault. The Glock was a tight little forty-caliber, solid and reliable, with a modified mag capacity of sixteen shots. More than enough for anything that might come up along the way.
But Brady believed in the inviolable principle of redundancy and hadn’t stopped there. He squeezed the left armrest in the driver’s door with one hand, popping the lever just under its lip with the other and flipping it open. He’d sent the armrest back for two redesigns, unsatisfied with the trickiness of its release the first couple of times. Like a mystery box he’d once bought in a souk in Marrakesh (awful, sweaty trip with bad food, it had been Paula’s idea early in their relationship), the armrest needed to be easy to open only once you knew how.
He knew how. He pulled out the J-Frame M&P Scandium he kept there, the one he’d special-ordered with the external hammer. Sometimes you wanted a weapon that operated on simple mechanical basics: pull this back, squeeze the trigger, bang. It was the type of gun with which nothing could possibly go wrong.
The M&P was there, it was loaded, and it had been cleaned and oiled recently.
Brady put both guns back in their sleeves and shut the lids. He gave the driver’s door a tug and it closed with a soft whoosh. He hung Saint Christopher around the rearview, letting it dangle at whatever height he pleased, adjusted the seat and mirrors, and started the engine.