Ghostman by Roger Hobbs Read Free Book Online Page A

from Bangor to South Beach, but if you know how to act like somebody else and you have thechops to prove it, you could live on Park Avenue and nobody would ever notice. People see what you tell them to see.
    Angela and I were professional impostors.
    She got her start as an actress in Los Angeles. She was very good at it, like you’d expect, but that didn’t translate into success on the screen. Her acting was pathological. She was pure Method. She didn’t act, she changed who she was. Casting directors hated her for it. A man might pull off spending his whole life in character, but not a beautiful young woman. She was a different person for every person she met. She’d get cast as a trophy wife and show up as a little girl. Her first measure of success was as a corporate spy. She bluffed her way into an executive-assistant position for a major aeronautics company. Got paid a hundred grand to steal a blueprint for a military jet and deliver it to the next company over. I don’t think she did anything else but steal after that. She made enough money to eventually begin creating her own personal roles. She’d wake up each morning and choose who she wanted to be that day. When she found me, she was posing as an FBI agent so she could rob a cartel of counterfeiters. She tricked me into helping her, and I was hooked.
    From that day on, I was her apprentice.
    These days, I’m the best in the business. I can hit a bank and disappear in two days, and nobody would ever know I was even there. I could talk my way into Congress, if I wanted to. But as good a liar and a thief as I am, I could never hold a candle to Angela. She taught me everything I knew. I watched her flick her cigarette butt and stomp it into the soft, moist earth. I drank a bourbon and listened to the sound of her voice in my ear.
    When the meeting was over, Angela took me by the arm and led me off into the forest behind the last cabin. We walked and we walked and we walked until my pupils were like dinner plates. It was as dark as the inside of an eyelid back there. The only light was from the moon behind the clouds. After maybe half a mile, she stopped and turned and staredright at me like she had something to say. She didn’t speak for a long time, but when she did, she spoke in her real voice. She spoke in the voice that she only ever used with me.
    “What are you doing here?” She looked up and shook her head. “What did he do to get you here?”
    “Nothing. He gave me a location, that’s all.”
    “I thought I taught you never to go on a job without all the information up front. I thought I taught you never to trust a stranger, especially if that stranger’s planning a job. I thought I taught you to be careful.”
    “You did teach me that.”
    “Then what the hell are you doing here?”
    I didn’t answer. I thought it was obvious. I stared into her eyes for a while. She was a brunette then, with pixie-short hair and lipstick the color of blood oranges. She wore a four-thousand-dollar dress and diamond earrings no woman had worn in two hundred years, because she had stolen them from a museum. To say she was beautiful would be to miss the point. She was anything you wanted her to be. I stood there for a while until she sighed and took me by the arm again. When we got back to the hotel, her dress and my suit were covered in mud. She walked me to my room and said good night in the hallway. I listened to her footsteps down the stairs. That was how the Asian Exchange Job started.
    We went to work in the morning.
    Back then, Marcus was the man to work for. He wasn’t a cartel kingpin yet. He was a full-time jugmarker. He wrote heists the way Mozart wrote music. They were big and beautiful and made money like you wouldn’t believe. Five years ago, everybody wanted a shot at one of his jobs, because everything he touched turned to gold. There was a dark side, even then, sure. I’d heard rumors about what happened to anybody who failed him. But those