Gun Work

Frankly, Barney felt as if they had just been waiting around all their lives for the right excuse. The crime of non-action was on par with giving a talented artist plenty of paint, brushes, canvas, inspiration, and time... and then not allowing him to paint.

There was a wealth of wiggle time if anybody wanted to bail. Three more weeks, minimum, of working the guns on the range and warming up the newer guns through their break-in periods, usually measured in hundreds of rounds... or, in Barney’s case, two to three thousand rounds per gun before he began to develop the correct muscle memory for accurate handling in combat. Each weapon had its own personality and eccentricities, and familiarization was essential. Each weapon had its brothers and sisters, multiples of Karlov’s painstaking labor, and they all had to be broken in.

A lot of bang-bang, enough to make you wash the gunpowder out of your hair every night.

Training specs called for a 70/30 ratio of dry fire to live fire, with a shooting timer. Armand actually videotaped Barney’s range drills; tape doesn’t lie.

Before it settled into enough of a routine to make them lazy, Barney announced that he was taking a little trip, by himself.

Sirius was a tiny bit disappointed, since he had worked out labyrinthine plans for interstate firearms transport; there were the complications of multiple IDs for all them at various altitudes of impermeability, ticketing for trains and planes, proper camouflage of any potential paper (or Internet) trail, lodgings, rally points, emergency fallback rendez, and clean work cars with the right paper. All the coordination of logistics made Sirius feel like a career criminal, or a roadie for a heavy metal band.

“All this prep makes me feel like a career criminal,” Sirius said. “Or a roadie for a heavy metal band.”

“Hey, at least you don’t have to score big flour sacks of blow,” said Barney. “Or platoons of hookers.”

“Or waste time cherry-picking the right color M&Ms,” said Armand.

“I’ve got some ironclad resources here,” returned Sirius. “I just don’t wanna waste ‘em.”

“You’re not,” said Barney. “Just tell me who your guy is in New Jersey.” He was referring to a strip yard Sirius had mentioned where he could obtain a nondescript vehicle with alternate plates, not a junker.

Barney’s first port of call was New York City, a place where possession of a firearm can get you automatic jail time.

The hardest part about finding Felix Rainer in New York, for Barney, was choosing the right business suit. About half-strength Armani was what he required in order to present the correct nouveau-riche profile. The illusion only needed to fool everyone for less than a running minute of time.

The data pull on Felix Rainer was notably public. In 1995 — after the junk bond boom of the 1980s and the brief last-round flurry of dotcoms in the early 1990s — he split from a liquid but undistinguished brokerage firm to co-found The Bleecker Street Group with two other partners. They kept the company lean as they began buying corporate properties and learned the pleasures of private equity, then of running a hedge fund specializing in distressed debt. Through calculated strikes they prospered, branching out into brand-extensions and country-specific restructuring funds... which to Barney whispered “Mexico.”

On closer examination it was easy to see that Bleecker Street’s maverick risk structure was pretty kissin’ close to gambling, buying chemical companies out of favor in 2004 and taking them public in foreign countries when the old-economy names got hot again. Your best opportunities to sock away millions came when legitimate banks were willing to provide lender leverage into the billions. They acquired and unloaded office buildings faster than playing lightning Monopoly, and were always raising capital for their latest buyout fund.

Rainer was low-profile, hewing to the maxim laid down by Wall Street superstar Aldous Blackmoor: “Never be the poster boy. When the era changes, the poster boy gets ripped off the wall.”

Rainer and his crew were Harvard hustlers, always on the sniff for Justice Department investigations into what were called “club buyouts.” When quoted, they worried about interest rates; in private they amassed astonishing debt in order to bulk-purchase; Rainer’s phrase for it was “economies of scale,” which to Barney translated as that old TV commercial in which the screaming carpet salesman says, “How do we do it? VOLUME!”

It took less than a day for Barney to sketch Felix Rainer’s movement template. The guy began a rigorous workday at 7:30 AM sharp and went everywhere by chauffeured limousine. He owned the entire top floor of the ovoid Capitol Towers Building on Columbus Circle. Private staff and security measures had him pretty boxed, but Barney knew there was no such thing as genuine security this side of the grave.