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April 2014 · AIIB Mission Month -2

D ust cheered the day Abe finally got Nick Short.

It took three attempts and countless hours of work — none of which he had been involved in. He was too busy prepping to infiltrate The Company itself, but the team working on Short kept Dust apprised of the situation. They all knew his real work couldn't begin until Short was gone, anyway.

He tried not to be disappointed after the first failure. They hadn't really been given an attempt, that first time. The team from Abe had always planned on taking him out during a heist, but that led to myriad questions. Would they be able to coordinate with the cops on the ground in Las Abras — both to keep them out of Abe's way and to keep them safe from the mayhem The Company would surely create? Would it be better to have a cop kill him in plain sight or should they get the cops involved at all?

It hadn't mattered. That first heist had been postponed or cancelled or changed in some way that Abe wasn't privy to. The elite team from Abe showed up on site, ready to make their assassination under the cover of chaos that The Company itself would provide. They had waited for hours, tapping their ear pieces, trying to stay sharp even as their calves cramped and backs spasmed.

Finally, they called it. The Company was not coming that day.

The second attempt had been even more disappointing.

It was four months later — four months! Dust lamented. He sat with his fat binder for four whole months. By then, he was so familiar with the contents, he could speak each line backwards if Leiby had wanted him to.

During the day, he had to leave it tucked safely in his desk — but it came home to his empty apartment with him every night, where Dust toted it from room to room.

The binder sat on the counter as he cooked a plain dinner, the mug shot of Leta Wright staring up at him. (It looked more like a modeling Polaroid, Dust thought, than a mug shot. Wright had dark, perfect skin and the light of the police station played over her features in the photograph in a harsh way that somehow made the woman more beautiful. Her head was clean shaved and shining in the photo — Wright was somehow more glamorous bald than Dust could believe. He tried to imagine Wright's voice and never could).

The binder followed him to the dining room table, where he sat cross-legged and stared at Vashvi "Vi" Dhillon. (They had many pictures of Dhillon: posed photos and headshots from her life as a civilian and candid shots from security monitors and through long lenses. Dhillon was smiling in every one, whether she was looking at the camera or not. It was a brilliant white grin — Dhillon had significant orthodontic work done as a kid. While her teeth were straight, the smile was crooked, as if there was a joke on the tip of her tongue. Her long black hair flowed around her, picked up by the wind in some shots. She looked like a chubby, good-natured kid and Dust already had to remind himself of the lives that have been lost at the end of Vashvi Dhillon's sniper rifle).

He laid the binder across his lap in the living room, turning on a television that he wouldn't watch because he was arrested again by the sight of Herron Dent without their mask. (Dent was not at all what Dust had expected. They — Abe called Herron Dent they because no one had gathered sufficient evidence to assign them a gender — looked almost fragile, almost skeletal, and older than they were. Behind the assassin's skull mask were two big, brown eyes that looked almost mournful, an equine nose, and a thin, serious mouth. They had straight hair the same color as Dust's, a dark brunette — Dust couldn't tell how long, but it flowed past their shoulders, at least. He wondered how on earth Abe had laid hands on the photo.)

He carried the binder to bed with him, knowing that he wouldn't sleep well, that at some point during the night he’d wake up and switch on a light and open up the binder to a page at random. At 2 a.m., Russell Wayles would stare up at him from the page. (Russell Wayles, born "Edith," looked friendly and open and childlike. In every grainy security image, he was touching someone else in the crew — a gentle hand on Dhillon's arm or a shoulder jostling into the taller Leta. He looked like he was skipping in a photo that Dust had come to regard as his favorite. It was full color and clearer than the rest, showing the deep tan he sported that made his skin almost the same golden color as his close-cropped hair. Wayles was tawny and lanky and simply looked, Dust thought sometimes, like a nice guy. )

Carrow he saved. He couldn't say why, exactly. But he only spent time with Carrow’s page early in the morning, when he was still waking up and blowing cool air over the surface of his milky cup of coffee... As if it were only possible to look at the head of The Company through the haze of a drowsy morning — too frightening to stare at him sober and fully conscious.

They had plenty of pictures on file of him — so many, in fact, that they hadn't bothered including them all in the binder that Leiby gave to him.

The ones they had included were clear and curated to teach him things about the man.

They showed his slouching posture as he walked by Leta’s side — and Dust was surprised when he first saw that photo by how much taller Leta seemed than Carrow, even though she only had one or two inches on him. He didn't feel the need to posture up around his partner, Dust gathered. He wasn't worried about appearing shorter, smaller than her.

In another photo that Dust always thought looked like a still from a movie, he was half-lit and examining a heavy tumbler of brown liquor in his hand, seated alone in a back booth at Kamarra. His back booth, Dust knew from the information printed on the opposite page.

He allowed himself to wonder why Carrow had been alone that night and what he'd been thinking about as he watched the liquid swirling in his glass. Whiskey, he assumed, apropos of nothing. The strange angled light cut across his face to show heavy-lidded eyes, dark hair that had gone a little shaggy in between trims, and full lips framed by several days of beard growth.

He looked exhausted in that photo and Dust always wondered why and when it was taken and how the photographer had gotten the shot. His posture looked bent as if by some increased gravity that only had power over Carrow.

He wasn't smiling in any of the pictures — as if he had known Abe was taking them. Or maybe the man just didn't smile.

Dust was quick to fill in the gaps when it came to the other people in the crew. He could imagine from the small details given to him that Vashvi Dhillon and Herron Dent would toss jokes back and forth over the dinner table. He would conjure up the fantasy of Russell Wayles playfully and softly kicking Leta Wright under the table when she was in a bad mood until finally she smiled. He could almost hear their voices in his head, see their baby pictures, pick out their favorite music and their individual quirks — who casually overslept, who checked the door locks five times until they were satisfied, who insisted on riding shotgun.

But he could never make Carrow fit into that little fantasy world he built in those four months that he waited for them to try and kill Nick Short again.

The second attempt on the ballistics expert's life was not as fruitless as the first — it just wasn't successful.

Again, a heist. Again, the question of whether or not to involve the cops.

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 to escape — 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 after he 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'd picked up the box truck with 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 in right 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 a sting 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 and dropped 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.

Leiby listened and Dust kept going until he had nothing left to say. When he was utterly emptied of words, they defaulted to an easy silence, both of them breathing steady, communicating only in those quick glances they caught sometimes, Leiby lofting her eyebrows as if to say "It's gonna happen, kid. Hold steady."

By 1 a.m., Leiby had produced a mostly full bottle of tequila from her office, pouring a shot for each of them into the now-empty coffee mugs.

Dust was warm and pleasantly buzzed when Leiby's phone chimed on the table. They shared one serious look as Leiby reached for it. Dust slowed his breathing. Leiby unlocked the phone and tapped through screens until she was reading the message from the crew on the ground.

"Tell me they got him," Dust breathed out when Leiby didn't react immediately.

"It looks good," Leiby said after a pause. "They don't have confirmation but... it looks good. "

Dust hadn't allowed himself to celebrate — not yet. He’d just nodded.

"You should go home. It could be days before we verify."

Dust wanted to balk at that. Couldn't he stay just a few more hours, in case they got closure tonight? He was too wired to be sleepy and yet... Leiby was right, of course.

If they hadn't gotten a clean hit but had apparently hurt the guy bad enough for Leiby to say that the chances are good that he's dead, it probably would be days before they knew one way or another. There was always the chance that Carrow’s winning streak would hold up and someone somewhere would be stitching the pieces of Nick Short back together as he sat there, several states away.

He’d sighed and agreed and had another cup of coffee, just for good measure, to sober up before he drove home to his dark, empty apartment, where he didn't sleep and couldn't make himself eat and sat instead with the binder held against his chest like a bible.

There was more concrete evidence that the chances "looked good" the next day. He was in early and unsurprised to see Leiby there at her desk at seven. She'd probably been unable to sleep, too, but now they had more to go on. Leiby handed over a file of grainy, gruesome photos. There was Nick Short, looking incredibly corpse-like as Carrow and Herron Dent dragged him from a building's wreckage.

“This looks good for us,” Dust said.

“It looks very good.”