Page 14 of The Company We Keep

This time, they had. They'd coordinated with Las Abras PD on the ground, let them know what they knew about The Company’s plan for a heist. Abe's intelligence arm reported that they were planning on intercepting an enormous delivery of cocaine at the regional airport on the north side of Las Abras. They knew only some of the details of the plan.

Vashvi Dhillon would be perched on a cliff in a narrow passage cut between a rocky embankment. She would wait for the armored truck, which would be carrying the shipment, sure to be crawling with hired protection. She would execute the driver.

Abe was a little foggy on what would happen next. Was it The Company’s aim to crash the truck? Would they use Nick Short to get past the reinforcements the truck posed, or would they use him to create a diversion as they so often did?

Not much went according to Abe’s imagined plan — that much was clear after the fact.

Dust hadn't talked to anyone who was actually out on the site that night, but Leiby gave him access to a written report afterwards. (Leiby gave him everything she could get her hands on about The Company — even things above his clearance level).

Russell Wayles had been on the ground that day — actually on a bike and not sequestered away in the tech van. The Abe team stood by, watching Wayles watch the shipment get loaded onto the armored truck. They'd been right about security: there were six men, fully strapped and overseeing everyone who got within a hundred feet of the truck. Wayles stayed still and invisible until they were out of the protection of the airport perimeter, three guards in the back of the truck with the shipment and three in the cab to protect the driver.

The hired protection couldn't shield the driver from Vashvi Dhillon's bullets, though. She executed him from her perch up on the rocks, exactly at the point that Abe had predicted, right where the road went narrow.

And then several things happened at once.

The truck coasted in a straight line before it jackknifed across two lanes, wedging itself into the rocks and blocking both directions of traffic. Then an explosion shook the rock face on the stretch of road between the airport and Vashvi’s hiding place, dislodging enough enormous boulders to block any sort of retreat back towards the airport. The guards in the cab had exited the truck and Vashvi had picked them off easily. A quarter mile down the road, away from the airport, police set up a blockade.

But the Abe agents knew something was off. LAPD had been instructed to fall back from whatever was happening — told not to get involved while the criminals fought the criminals, and to let the victors go. Abe needed The Company toescape — without Nick Short, of course — and go back to their penthouse.

(Not that it was a real possibility that LAPD was going to stop The Company. Abe wouldn't be up to its armpits in an infiltration operation if LAPD could take care of its own problems. The agents just didn't want to see a bunch of cops getting shot on their watch — and that tended to happen when the LAPD got in the way of one of The Company’s heists.)

So the cops at the blockade weren't LAPD. The AIIB agents cautiously got closer to the three vehicles, lights flaring, with four uniformed officers setting up a neat road blockade.

It had been Nick Short. The "cops" were all people employed by or part of The Company: Nick Short, Coffee, their driver, and the two so-called face men of their operation: Maxine and Guru.

(Dust could picture it. The four of them made an odd assortment. Maxine was young and pale as a wafer, mild-looking with blunt-cut blond hair. She'd have been flanked by the three older men, Guru with his strange posture and inscrutable stare, the olive-skinned Coffee with his smirk, and Nick Short looking like a walk-on from "Boogie Nights.")

Short didn't normally work like this. He placed his charges and ran or he stood his ground alone and picked off cops. Short was simply not a teamwork sort of fellow — favoring handling bombs over the intricacies of tandem operations. But Wayles had detonated the charge remotely before skidding away in the opposite direction with Vashvi on the back of his bike.

There wasn't, in fact, a single man from The Company in the safe, blocked zone the team had created between the rocks and the fake cops — and that was exactly where Abe had planted its agents, hoping to take Short out either afterhe detonated the main charge or before he was able to blast his way into the trailer.

But that wasn't in the cards. Because they hadn't accounted for Leta Wright.

Leta came to retrieve the trailer — drugs, guards, and all — completely intact, taking it out in the only direction possible: up. She'dpicked up the box truckwith a Sikorski big boy chopper while the Abe agents watched from their cover. (Dust wished he could've seen the expressions on their faces when that beautiful bald Amazon ascended with her bounty. He would've paid to see it happen with his own eyes.)

They hadn't planned on the Company being so flamboyant with the score. It was the most audacious heist yet — and it added a real urgency to the tone of Dust's mission. They needed him in and they needed him inright then, not in four more months. They amped up efforts and considered new avenues to off Short.

It was clear that the Company was getting more ambitious. They'd been handed too many perfect crimes over the past four years. And who wouldn't be feeling invincible? It didn't matter how many bullets LAPD pumped into them or how many times rival gangs made an attempt on Carrow or Leta Wright. Each time, they were back at it, stitched back together and smirking into security cameras like every one of them to a person was having the absolute goddamned time of their life.

For the agents, it was maddening.

For Dust, it was thrilling. They needed him for this — he was the inside man. He was the Trojan Horse who could get into that multi-million-dollar penthouse, get to Carrow, decapitate the crew and stop this growing wave of crime.

They needed him in and they knew it as well as he did. And for that, they needed Short gone. They could set up asting or lure Short with a meaty score — anything so that they wouldn't have to wait for another heist.

In the end, they only had to wait 10 days.

Dust wondered why there was so little down time between big jobs — but the plan as Abe understood it was a fairly small score. It was little league stuff: the contents of a safe in the basement of an office building. They'd barely be raking in six digits, and they didn't need the money that badly.

AIIB's intelligence side couldn't provide an explanation. Dust found himself running dialogues with the crew dopplegangers he had created in his head. The stand-in Leta said they needed to stay lean and stay active, fewer big-risk targets and more meat-and-potatoes heists. Or maybe Herron had a specific vendetta against the business in question. Or perhaps Wayles had intercepted some intelligence from a rival gang and even though they didn't need the money, The Company had decided to take on the score just to fuck with them.

All of the explanations fit the characters he had created for them. Dust wondered, then, if he’d ever get a chance to know the truth from their own mouths.

Leiby stayed in the office with Dust that night as they waited for news about the latest assassination attempt. They'd tried to eat a dinner of thick roast beef sandwiches from the deli down the street, but it had all felt like sawdust and gristle in Dust's mouth — he was so nervous, so worried that they'd fumble the attempt, that Nick Short would walk away that night and he’d be deferred yet again. He tried to eat but Leiby could read him easily. She'd wrapped their barely-touched sandwiches in the wax paper they came in anddropped them back into the office fridge before retrieving two cups of coffee.

They didn't try to pretend that they were calm and collected enough to be thinking about anything but the mission that night. Leiby let him talk about it — really let Dust prattle on about what he’d been thinking, about the contents of the binder — and it felt good. Dust couldn't talk to his parents about the possibility of going undercover, of course. He couldn't talk to most of his coworkers. He didn't have close friends and hadn’t taken a lover in years — but even if he had, he wouldn't have been able to talk to them about it, either.

So it was a true relief to unburden himself to Leiby. He spoke and spoke and spoke and Leiby listened. He talked about the way he felt like he knew The Company already.

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