Ghostman by Roger Hobbs Read Free Book Online Page B

were just rumors. I saw firsthand what happened to the men who succeeded. They flew away rich. Very rich.
    Two days later, Angela and I were on a chartered jet with the others, flying from Los Angeles to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Though it wasMarcus’s charter, he didn’t come with us. He was going to run the whole thing from Seattle by satellite phone. He was like Caesar when he was in the back of his restaurant, but none of us complained. He was going to make us rich.
    I was the one who screwed it up.

6
    The flight to Atlantic City took five hours.
    The jet was a Cessna Citation Sovereign, a midsized two-engine the size of a semitruck, with a range of about three thousand miles. It was fueled and waiting when I arrived at the gate, and there was no security check. The man at the airport entrance took one look at Marcus’s limo and waved us through. We pulled up next to the plane on the tarmac and I walked directly up the stairs. I shook the pilots’ hands, but we didn’t bother with introductions. Time was of the essence here. We were wheels up in five minutes. We had twenty-five hundred miles to fly.
    I carried a black nylon bag over my shoulder. Marcus had given me enough time to pick up a few things from my apartment. In the bag was my Colt .38 revolver with the bobbed hammer, which Marcus had given back. A toothbrush. Shaving kit. Makeup. Hair dye. Leather gloves. A few passports, driver’s licenses, state ID cards and two prepaid burner phones. The five grand from Marcus, and three black Visa corporate cards with a different alias on each one. At the bottom was a faded copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses , translated by Charles Martin. I always travel light.
    I was excited to get on the plane. It had been a long time since I’dhad a job like this. I’m very picky. When I’m not working, time seems to pass by in a haze. The days blend together, then the weeks, like a tape recorder set on Fast Forward. I sit in my apartment, at the desk facing the window, and watch the sun come up. I read the Greek and Latin classics again and translate them on yellow legal pads, some in German or French as well. Some days I don’t do anything else but sit there and read. My translations go on for hundreds of pages. Aeschylus, Caesar, Juvenal, Livy. Reading their words helps me think. When I’m not on the job, I don’t have any words of my own.
    This was what I’d been waiting for—a job that, for once, wasn’t going to be boring .
    The Cessna was beautiful on the inside. I’d never flown in that model before, but it was like most of the other private jets I’d seen. It had a nose like a hunting bird and two big engines under the tail. The takeoff was like an amusement-park ride, but once we got up five and a half miles, the flying was easy and the engine noise minimal. There were eight seats, plus two for the pilots, and the sticker price was just south of twenty million. For that amount of money, every seat was like first class. There was a full-sized bar in the back of the cabin, a flat-screen TV overhead tuned to a twenty-four-hour news channel, a satellite phone next to the coffee machine and a wireless connection to the Internet. When the copilot came back and said it was okay to walk around, I made a pot of coffee. I still felt uncomfortable. You can barely stand upright in one of these things.
    I brought the coffee flask with me back to my seat, poured myself a cup and drank it. I poured myself another and opened up my book. Something was making me nervous, but I couldn’t quite figure out what.
    After about twenty minutes, a story with the graphic Shoot-out at the Regency came on the television and I turned up the sound. The names of the victims were being withheld, but an old picture of Moreno in olive-drab fatigues flashed on the screen followed by a couple of shock shots of the hotel-casino tower and a line of bullet holes in the cement. A news crew was set up on the Boardwalk. I could make out where the heisthad