Free Plan B by Joseph Finder Page A

payroll.
    I grabbed the first flight out of Boston.
    Benito drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “This thing’s a piece of crap,” he said. He had a friend who ran an ambulance company and had agreed, for a wad of cash, to leave his vehicle yard unsecured for an hour earlier that day.
    “If I’m ever hit by a car in Barcelona, remind me to walk to the hospital,” I said. “I think I’d get there faster.”
    He looked at his watch. “Let’s just hope we don’t need this ambulance as an ambulance,” he said. “You’re not going to kill nobody, yes?”
    “I’m a man of peace.”
    “Yeah? You never kill people?”
    I looked at him. He wasn’t smiling.
    “I was in the Special Forces,” I said.
    “I don’t mean in combat.”
    “Never.” I paused for a moment. “Hardly ever.”
    “Hardly ever,” he repeated, thinking it over.
    “Sometimes you have no choice.”
    “It’s the, how you say, self-defense.”
    “Sometimes.”
    “And other than that?”
    “Never,” I said. I was staring out the window, but I could feel his doll-button eyes on me. “Hardly ever,” I amended.
    “Hardly ever,” he repeated, and snorted.
    “It’s always something you want to avoid. If possible.”
    Benito grunted. “So it’s a fallback. A Plan B.”
    “It’s not going to come to that tonight.”
    “You never know what might happen.” Benito was chewing the skin on the side of his left index finger. “The Spanish, they have a saying. ‘ Cuando menos piensa el galgo, salta la liebre.’ It means like, just when the hunting dog least expects it, the jackrabbit jumps out.”
    “I’m not worried about rabbits,” I said.
    “It means—”
    “I get what it means. But don’t worry. You and I and the girl are going to get out safe and sound. Anybody gets in the way of that—well, I didn’t bring a Havahart trap.”
    He didn’t seem reassured. “We ready?”
    “Five minutes,” I said, glancing at my watch. “That’s when the guards’ shift changes.”
    Carrer de la Font del Lleó was a narrow street at the foot of a steep, scrubby incline, its sandy soil overgrown with stunted, windswept trees and tangled vines. On one side was a narrow sidewalk bordered by a neatly manicured hedgerow into which were cut driveways fortified by gates and guard booths, the entrances to humbler residences, and the occasional utility pole.
    Carved into the steep slope of the Collserola mountain overlooking downtown Barcelona was a vast estate: a sprawling villa with a red barrel-tile roof, an Olympic-size swimming pool and a clay tennis court, a lot of terraces and a manicured lawn and ornamental trees and shrubs and all that.
    Between the terrain and the foliage and the high stone wall surrounding the property, you couldn’t see much of the house from the street. But Benito had obtained the architect’s blueprints from the city registry. And for the last two days I’d been conducting surveillance of the house from various vantage points in the area, using a high-powered scope and a good camera with a telephoto lens. I’d borrowed Benito’s Labrador and taken a couple of leisurely strolls around the property. Once I even let him slip the leash and watched him scramble up the slope bordering the southwestern wall. I was a frustrated neighbor with an unruly pet. I followed him through the spiny gorse and the dry, thorny brolla shrubs, nearly losing my footing as the sandy soil gave way, grabbing on to the branch of a gnarled almond tree. Geckos scuttled by.
    Soon I knew the make and model of the thirty-six CCTV cameras that ringed the property. I knew that anyone who came within twelve feet of the wall would appear on a monitor inside. I’d noticed the five strands of high-tensile wire atop the eight-foot stone wall through which ten thousand volts pulsed at one-second intervals. If you touched it, you fried. If you tried to cut it, you’d trigger the alarm. Also, I saw the taut steel wire threaded through the anchor