19 Purchase Street (52 page)

With one hundred and sixty degrees below zero to contend with the heat sensor alarms would not be picking up any body temperatures this night.

Leslie dropped down the bundle of laundry bags and the tackle line with a good-sized blunt hook on the end of it.

Gainer and Chapin took a moment to get the feel of where they were. Their awe silently rotated them in place. The sheaf upon sheaf of stack after stack on shelf after shelf.

Of money.

Floor to ceiling, wall to wall money.

Three billion dollars of it.

How's this for stealing, Norma?

“Get
packing
,” Leslie whispered from above to break the spell.

It was ten-three when Gainer spread open the mouth of the first laundry bag and tossed in the first half million. He did not overload the bag, only put about three million in it so that at sixty pounds it would be easy to handle. He drew its nylon cord closed, knotted the cord and slipped it onto the hook.

Leslie was up on the roof. The rain was a bit more than a sprinkle now. She drew on the tackle line, brought it up hand over hand to herself. The pulley made it practically effortless for her. Like drawing a drapery.

The sixty pound bag came up through the roof and out. When it neared the top of the pulley, Leslie needed only to give it a slight push with her foot to swing it over and transfer it to the slide.

Quickly she undid the hook.

The first three million went zooming down.

The rain on the slide's polyurethane surface increased slickness. The bag was probably doing thirty miles an hour when it took the ninety degree banked curve at the roof of the shed and continued on down the longer, less steep portion of the slide to Vinny.

Vinny had moved the truck so it was in perfect position with the slide. He was up on the flat ramp that ran the entire length of the tanker's compartments. Gasoline fumes were rising thick from them, making Vinny feel a bit heady.

The first bag flew off the slide.

Vinny stopped its momentum and let it drop through the open hatch, heard the slight percussive thump as it hit bottom inside the empty metal tanker. It was difficult for Vinny to accept that what had just passed through his hands was three million. He didn't have much time to think about it because here came another.

By midnight two hundred and forty million dollars had been packed, pulleyed up, slid down and dropped into the belly of the tanker.

Vinny moved the tanker so the slide fed to the next compartment.

Leslie and Chapin traded responsibilities, just so she could be down there with Gainer for a while. She gave Gainer a swig of Tupelo honey, a half teaspoon of cayenne and a couple of squirts of Rescue before they got going again.

Gainer had the packing of the laundry bags down to a system that wasted no motion. He swept the sheaves of money off the shelves with his forearm, and if some happened to miss the mouth of the bag, he didn't bother with it. The only trouble was that by now a layer of money was underfoot, most of it torn from its bindings and scattered around. To make matters worse, the rain that fell through the hole in the roof and ceiling was causing a lot of the loose hundreds to become soggy, mushy as
papier-mâché
.

By two
A.M.
most of the shelves were still stacked neatly, untouched. They had managed to get only five hundred million or so into the tanker.

Leslie was working like a woman possessed.

During a pause Gainer observed her hard at it and wondered if being surrounded by such an enormous amount of cash had caused her to have an acute, intense attack of the
monies
. She must have felt his eyes on her because she glanced his way and blew him three rapid kisses, one with the tip of her tongue out. However, her hands never let up on the money.

Gainer knew, of course, he was required to steal a lot of The Balance, not necessarily all of it. What they had already would be enough.

Chapin suggested that when he came down to switch responsibilities with Leslie again.

Gainer was tired, sweating, had worked harder than any of them, but he wanted to keep at it, was determined to get away with as many millions as possible. He had his mind set on no less than a billion.

At six
A.M.
they had to stop.

Chapin climbed up the rope.

Gainer took a final look around at the empty shelves and those still neatly stacked, untouched. He estimated they'd gotten about a third of what had been there. He climbed the rope and joined Chapin and Leslie on the roof.

Chapin was the first to take the slide down. He just got up into it and let go. Next thing he knew he was on the tanker ramp with Vinny.

Leslie was next. She kept hold of the edges of the slide, spread her legs and angled them over the edges left and right to brake herself. It took some doing, but she slid down the slick steep a foot or two at a time to the curved section. Rolled off the slide onto the roof of the shed.

Gainer got onto the slide and let himself go deadweight, swooshed full-out all the way to the tanker.

Its hatches were closed, ready to go.

Vinny, behind the steering wheel, had the engine idling. Chapin was next to him. Gainer swung down to the cab and climbed in.

The tanker started mowing down saplings and undergrowth.

Leslie remained on the roof of the shed until she felt sure the tanker was under way. She could see only the upward flare of its headlights moving beyond the high wall. The sound of its engine, baffled by the wall, seemed a long way off.

Dawn was coming on.

Everything turning gray, becoming defined.

Leslie noticed some black, humpy shapes in a flowerbed beneath the span of the slide, halfway to the wall. Laundry bags of money, several that had apparently taken the curve too fast and been flung off by momentum. If even one of the bags had landed in a sensitive area of the pressure alarm grid …

Leslie climbed down the stepladder to the ground, hesitated there to remove a small black bundle the size of her fist from her carryall. She unsnapped it, shook it and helped it blossom out into yards and yards of a full-cut, practically weightless rain cape. She inserted her head through its opening, and the fabric fell around her, enveloping her.

Removed her gloves.

Used those to quickly wipe the black make-up from her face.

Then she stepped out from behind the shed and walked around to the front of the house to her Corniche. Got in, started it up, took an appraising look at herself in the mirror on the sun visor. She'd missed some black around her nose and neck. Wiped it away with a tissue. Yanked the kerchief from her head, shook her hair loose and combed it with the fingers of one hand while her other hand steered the winding drive down to the gatehouse.

The security man on duty there saw her coming, recognized her, her car. Nevertheless he glanced at the current “Allowed and Expected” list and found she was on it. He did not think it unusual that she would be leaving that early. “Allowed and Expected” people came and went at all hours at Number 19, didn't they?

CHAPTER NINETEEN

D
ARROW
stood in The Balance Room, soggy money squishing beneath the soles of his white buck shoes. “Sweet Jesus,” he murmured.

Hine had discovered the robbery when he'd routinely let the collators in at eight. He immediately summoned Darrow, not telling him what was wrong because he wanted the pleasure of Darrow's reaction.

Darrow put his hand on Hine's arm to steady himself.

Hine drew his arm away.

“Get security up here,” Darrow said to everyone. His voice had more
please
than authority in it. His eyes traveled up the knotted rope to the opening in the ceiling, the opening in the roof, the sky.

The clouds that had been solid for the last twenty-four hours chose that moment to break and display some blue high above them. Darrow did not like the looks of it.

“How much do you think is missing?” he asked Hine.

Hine did a little shrug with his hand. “It'll have to be counted.”

“Will you do that for me?”

“Glad to,” Hine said.

“Better not touch anything until security's had a look.”

Darrow closed his eyes, turned, slipped a bit in the greenish-gray mush and left The Balance Room. He walked slowly down the hall, as though his feet were lead, unaware of the smile from Hine that was hitting him in the back. He trudged down the main stairs and into the dining room. Sat for breakfast across from Lois Hine.

“Someone got into The Balance,” he told her, subdued.

She was having something to eat before she went up to bed. She yawned and then crunched a corner from a piece of crustless toast with her perfect front teeth.

“It appears they took a lot of it.”

“
Tant pis
,” she said. So much the worse for dear Darrow. She removed the top from a sterling jam server, ate a straight spoonful of conserved strawberries that had once grown wild in a field in Scotland, got up, took her coffee with her. Not the saucer, just the cup that dripped from its bottom onto the Kirman carpet as she left Darrow sitting there.

He sat slouched, brought himself up but only to slouch again. Couldn't keep his legs still under the table. The sunny-side up eggs that were placed before him were an inappropriately light-hearted color. He unfolded the
Wall Street Journal
as he usually did. His hands seemed detached, two separate performers. The couple of headlines he read got only as far as his eyes.

Steve Poole appeared in the doorway, waited for Darrow's permission to enter. A nod brought him to the table. He assumed a parade rest stance, hands clenched together behind him as though hiding something. Poole was supervisor of security at Number 19. He had once been Secret Service assigned to the White House and before that with Defense Intelligence. This Number 19 job was softer, paid more. Darrow himself had taken him on nine years ago.

“What have you found?” Darrow asked.

“We're still looking, sir.”

“So far.”

They had found the dry ice, the pulley, the slide, the hoist-truck on the airport side of the wall. They had found the security man in the shed with his head nearly cut off, the looped alarm circuits, four laundry bags of money among the roses in the rear garden. “There's a lot to go on,” Poole said.

A drop of encouragement in Darrow's bucket of despair.

“Right off, sir, I would say those who did it were extremely experienced professionals.”

Darrow tried to imagine what such professionals would look like. Ugly, sneaky types.

“And,” Poole added, “they must have had some inside knowledge of the place, first-hand or otherwise … the way they avoided our alarm systems.”

“Someone now working here?”

“Possibly …”

The faces passed through Darrow's mind like a rogue's gallery, including Hine and Sweet.

“… but more likely someone who used to work here,” Poole said.

Darrow had dismissed only three security men since he had been at Number 19, and a couple of collators. Three or four others had quit. They all seemed prime suspects now that he remembered them. He told Poole that.

“We've kept track of them,” Poole said. “All we have to do is reach out.”

Darrow felt a sudden rise of rage, like severe actute indigestion. He wanted to tell Poole it was security's fault, that security had been incompetent, probably asleep all night or watching television or jerking off one another. He wanted to say that he blamed Poole, personally, for misleading him into believing the alarm systems were impenetrable. However, his anger would have to wait. He needed Poole and the security people now more than ever, their expertise. His only hope was that the money, at least most of it, might be recovered and back in The Balance Room before anyone between himself and the High Board got wind of it.

“We'll keep this to ourselves, won't we, Poole?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do whatever you must, spend whatever is necessary.”

“I understand.”

“When will you get back to me?”

“By the end of the day.”

Poole hurried out.

Darrow flexed his legs beneath the table and complained that his eggs were cold.

What else could he do?

T
HE
Gulfstream II jet that touched down at Westchester Airport at three that Friday afternoon seemed too imposing to be carrying only one passenger. However, only one man stepped out down out of it and transferred to the Lincoln stretch limousine waiting on the apron.

Five minutes later the Lincoln passed through the gates of Number 19, made the climb and stopped at the front entrance. The man got out, went up to the door and walked right in. His two pieces of luggage followed.

He paused in the reception hall to survey the place. He'd never been to Number 19 before, but it was close to what he had expected.

His name was Horridge, Leland Porter Horridge.

A man in his early fifties. Slight but with a paunch. Business length gray hair beneath a gray homburg that matched his gray vested suit. His chrome wire-framed glasses were bifocaled. His plain eighteen karat cufflinks had belonged to his grandfather. His briefcase was the old-fashioned expandable sort but relatively new, made of fine black calf.

Horridge removed his homburg, placed it and his case respectfully on the hall console. He did not look at himself in the mirror above the console, merely stretched his neck to ease down a bit the starched collar of his shirt.

He went looking for Darrow.

Found him in his downstairs study, at his desk reading the New York
Post
, trying to get his worry off the robbery by going over the football opinions of the sportswriters and some of the more seamier items. Only the black cook knew he read that paper, brought it secretly to him each morning and disposed of it for him before she left each night. This was the first time he'd ever been caught with it. A social felony.