*****
ONE
They were in and out of the bank in three minutes.
It was late summer, a beautiful August morning in New York City, and the heat and humidity were at just the right level, pleasantly warm yet not stifling or uncomfortable. Above Manhattan, the sun beat down from the cloudless sky on the sea of tall buildings and skyscrapers scattered all over the island below. It had been a scorcher of a summer, the daily temperature consistently in the high 80s, but today was slightly cooler and brought much welcome relief for the eight million people living in the city area.
It was just past 9 am, Monday. As a consequence the streets were flooded with people making their way to work, sipping coffees, talking into phones or just striding on, head down, ready to get to the office and get started. The sidewalks and subway were crowded, but the slight drop on the thermostat meant that tempers were under control, making the journey into work a little more pleasant than it had been earlier in the summer.
One particular business opening its doors for service that Monday morning was a Chase Manhattan Bank. It was located on 2nd Avenue between 62nd and 63rd Streets, towards the southern tip of the Upper East Side, a neighbourhood running up the right side of Central Park that was renowned all over the world for its affluence and wealth. Chase had thirty banks in various locations all over Manhattan and this was one of the best placed of them all.
Across the United States, Chase as a financial institution enjoyed a staggering amount of daily custom and had amounts of cash in their reserves that could cure a third-world country’s deficit. With a company ATM inside the hundreds of Duane Reade drug stores in the city and immaculately clean and professional branch headquarters set up in locations such as this, it came as no surprise that Chase was one of the founding pillars of The Big Four, the four banks that held 39 % of every customer deposit across the United States. As a business, Chase had earned all those dollars and custom with the convenience of their branch locations and their excellent quality of service. They were renowned as one of the most reliable and dependable banks out there and it was a reputation they had worked hard to earn.
On that summer day it was also the last Monday of the month, August, and that meant something else to this particular bank.
Delivery day.
To keep the branch fully supplied with dollar currency, two men and a thick white armoured truck arrived at 9 am sharp every second Monday, never early, never late. One of the two men would step outside, unload a considerable amount of money from a hatch on the side of the vehicle and then take it into the bank, headed straight to the vault. It was an awkward yet vital part of running a financial institution: no bank can operate without money inside. Most modern banks around the world were built like military bunkers, the kind of places to give bank robbers nightmares. But for those twenty minutes or so each month whenever cash was delivered the bank was momentarily vulnerable, their collective managers secretly on edge despite their pretending to the contrary.
On the other side of the deal, anyone who decided to take a job inside the armoured truck was made well aware of the risks that came with that line of work before they signed on the dotted line. With the second highest mortality rate amongst all security roles in the United States, anyone inside one of these vehicles knew three undeniable facts.
One.
There were people out there who had a great interest in killing you.
Two.
There were people out there who had a great interest in protecting you.
And three.
At some point every fortnight, someone inside the vehicle had to step outside holding the cash.
That morning, the clock had just ticked to 9:03 am. The reinforced white armoured truck had pulled up outside the Upper East Side Chase bank three minutes ago, right on time. The two guys inside were both middle-aged, efficient yet relaxed, accustomed to this routine. They were retired cops, like most guys in this profession, but figured the rate of pay and healthcare plan that came with the job was worth any potential risk. They’d been working together for over two years and had set up a rota where they would take it in turns to deliver the cash, sharing the risk, giving one of them a week off while his partner took responsibility for the dollars in the bags.
That morning, the man in the front passenger seat unlocked his door and stepped out, slamming it shut behind him and hitching his belt as he moved to the side cabin on the truck. Back inside, his partner grabbed a copy of the New York Post and leaned back, going straight to the Sports headlines on the rear pages. He was relaxed, and rightfully so. He was sheltered behind twenty seven tons of reinforced steel and bullet-proof glass, enough to stop a firing squad of machine guns on full automatic or even an RPG. He and his partner also had a fully-loaded Glock 17 pistol on each hip, seventeen rounds in the magazine and two more clipped to their belts as extra insurance, a hundred and two extra reasons to feel confident about their safety. Chase and the armoured truck business took great care of the men inside these vehicles. They were carrying their profits and investments. If the two men got jacked, they weren’t the only ones who would suffer.
Outside the truck, the guard unloaded the supply from a cabin in the side of the vehicle, glancing left and right down the sunny sidewalk. Once he had the bags containing the money on a cart, he shut the cabin door and headed towards the entrance of the bank. As he approached the doors he started to relax. Another week down. Taking another quick look each way down the street, he shook off his unease as he grabbed the door handle and pulled it open. He’d been doing this exact routine for two years with no problems. And besides, this was the Upper East Side, not the ghetto. Movie stars and politicians lived up here, not gang members.
No-one in their right mind would ever try to rob this place, the man figured as he strode inside and headed towards the manager by the vault.
He was wrong.
Across the street to the north, three men and a woman watched in silence as the guard entered the bank. They were sitting in a yellow NYC taxi cab pulled up on the street corner between 63rd and 64th, twenty five yards behind the armoured truck. Vehicles passed them on the left as they headed downtown but the cab stayed tight to the kerb, the engine running, the light on the roof switched off to dissuade anyone from trying to hail it.
No-one paid any attention to the vehicle; it was just another normal part of everyday New York life, as common as pizza slices and Knicks jerseys.
Which made it the perfect getaway car.
Inside the vehicle, all four passengers were dressed in pristine white paramedic uniforms, lifted straight from a hospital supply depot in Queens a day earlier. Before taking the clothing out of its plastic wrapping, each of them had pulled three sets of latex gloves over their hands, serving as triple insurance against any tears and guarding against fingerprints or DNA that could be left on any of the equipment or clothing they used. Over the medic uniforms, three of them were also wearing white doctors’ overcoats, the kind a GP or a chemist would wear in a lab, also fresh from the packets. The driver wasn’t wearing one; he was staying in the car and wouldn’t need it.
The outfits were crisp and clean, covering every possible source of trace evidence, not a speck or stain on any part or any piece of the white fabric. If anyone studied them, the outfits would seem absurd; the three passengers were wearing a medic and a doctor’s uniform combined, something that never happened at the hospital or in the O.R. But to a casual observer, the clothing wouldn’t cast suspicion. There were much stranger and wackier outfits being worn across the city at that very moment, outfits far more peculiar than these.
Beside the driver, the guy in the front passenger seat checked his watch.
9:04 am.
He glanced up at the front door of the Chase branch.
No sign of the guard returning yet.
Inside the bank, the time lock on the vault would be off for another six minutes.
The world-wide back and forth battle between bank
s and thieves throughout history had seen modern vaults become close to impenetrable from the outside. The latest designs were cased with thick, steel-reinforced concrete, rendering the vaults themselves stronger than most nuclear bomb shelters. There was a famous story from the past of how four Japanese bank vaults in Hiroshima had survived the Atomic bomb of 1945. When survivors and rescue aid had eventually worked their way through the ruins of the city, they’d discovered the steel vaults fully intact. And when they got each one open, they also found that all the money inside was unharmed while everything else around each vault had been completely levelled by the devastating nuclear blast and subsequent fallout. The designs in those Teikoku banks that day were now over sixty years old. Bank vaults were amazingly resilient back then, able to withstand nuclear weapons, but now they were as close to impenetrable as was humanly possible to design.
The model in this particular Chase bank could definitely survive the same kind of destruction and punishment. It was a rock-solid piece. Two layers, an outer steel and concrete shell controlled by a spinlock code leading into a second vault, which was opened by simple lock-and-key and only by the bank manager himself. Once closed, it was pretty much impossible to open. Explosives would be useless. Anyone who tried to use them to open it would bring the building down before they made a scratch on the surface. And even if the correct combination was entered on the outer spinlock dial, the vault still wouldn’t open outside this fortnightly ten-minute window.
But despite those factors and the seemingly insurmountable odds, the four thieves inside the taxi were cool, calm and confident.
Because they knew one unalterable fact.
No matter how strong any bank vault was, at some point it had to be opened.
The man in the front seat checked his watch again. 9:05 am. He looked over at the bank, lit up in the morning sunlight. Still no sign of the tubby guard. He hadn’t come back out yet.
Any major drop-off, deposit or withdrawal from the vault itself had to happen every fourteen days in those two ten-minute periods. The manager had to plan all those things far in advance and operate fast from the moment the big hand on the clock ticked to 9am, working through a spread-sheet of planned transactions and satisfying every business and customer on the sheet. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were delivered from the truck, topping up the branch’s supply from the banking organisation itself, and equal amounts were often withdrawn. But outside that ten minute window every fortnight, the electronic lock would stay shut and the vault wouldn’t open, even if the correct code was entered.
An extra security measure was also to have an alarm code. If under duress or with a gun to their head, a manager or teller could pretend to enter the code to the vault and instead enter a six-digit code that triggered a silent alarm. The thieves would be standing there, waiting for the steel vault to open and suddenly find an entire police ESU team bursting in through the front doors behind them. Banks and their security divisions were constantly having to come up with new ways to foil any attempted bank robbery, methods and tricks the thieves didn’t yet know about; the silent alarm dial code was one of the latest and favourite measures at their disposal.
The man checked his watch again.
9:06 am.
Four minutes to go.
He didn’t panic. He’d observed the last four drop-offs. The guards in the truck, despite both being out of shape and relatively slow, always worked to a clock and the fat guy inside would be out in the next minute, giving them three left to work with.
One hundred and eighty seconds.
Plenty of time.
And just then, right on cue, the front door of the bank swung open. The guard reappeared, walking to the truck, and tapped the passenger door three times with his fist, waiting for his partner inside to put down his newspaper and unlock it.
‘Mark,’ said the man inside the taxi.
He watched the guard pull open the door and step inside the truck. At the same time, all four of the thieves in the taxi looked down and clicked a black digital Casio stopwatch wrapped around their wrists. The clock was ticking.
They had three minutes and counting.
The next instant, the guy behind the wheel took off the handbrake. Above them, the light flicked to green, perfect timing, and the driver moved the taxi forward, parking outside the bank like he was dropping off a customer. As the armoured truck drove off ahead of them and turned the corner, disappearing out of sight, the guy in the front passenger seat of the taxi grabbed the receiver to the vehicle radio off its handle. It had been retuned from the taxi dispatch depot to the NYPD frequency. He gripped it in his gloved hand and pushed down the buttons either side.
‘Officer down, I repeat, Officer down!’ he yelled into the handle. ‘I’m on East 95th and 1st! I need back-up, goddammit!’
As he spoke, the man and woman in the back seat lifted white surgical masks over the lower half of their faces, right up to their eyes, and pulled scrub hats over the top, concealing the upper half of their heads. All four of them were already wearing large aviator sunglasses, covering their eyes, the defining characteristic that would leave them identifiable to a witness and CCTV. Not wasting a second, the three thieves pushed open the doors and moved swiftly out of the car, the driver remaining behind the wheel, checking his watch.
From his seat he watched the rear-view mirror and saw a commotion in the traffic behind them, right on cue.
Police cars were streaming into the street from a building four blocks north, speeding east and north, their lights flashing, responding to the distress call. He smiled.
The NYPD’s 19th Precinct, New York City’s finest.
Every car and officer heading the opposite way.
And at that same moment, the three thieves entered the bank.
The second they passed through the front doors, the trio moved fast. The first task was to subdue everyone inside, most importantly the two guards. That had to happen before anything else. The man and woman from the back seat each pulled out a weapon hanging from a black strap looped around their right shoulders, hidden under the doctor’s coats. They were two Ithaca 37 12-gauge shotguns, police issue, the stocks sawn off so the weapons could be concealed under the coats. Clyde Barrow of Bonnie and Clyde fame had come up with the idea of removing the stock and hiding a shotgun under a coat when pulling a heist. The weapons possessed brutal power and with the stocks gone they were a cinch to conceal, unlike machine guns which were too bulky and wide to hide effectively. Clyde had called the sawn-off shotgun a whippit. The Sicilians, who were fond of the weapon themselves, called it a lupara. With seven shells locked and loaded inside the weapons, the three thieves robbing this bank called it instant crowd control.
They ran forward, each racking a shell by pulling the brown slide on the barrel of the weapon back and forth with their left hand, the weapons crunching as a shell was loaded into each chamber. Across the bank floor, customers turned and saw the sudden commotion. It took a split second for what they were seeing to fully register in their brains.
Then they reacted, some of them covering their mouths as others started to scream.
There were two guards in the bank, Walter Pick and Peter Willis, both retired NYPD, both sporting a paunch that middle age and the promise of an imminent pension brought. Both men also had a Glock 17 on their hip, like the two guys in the truck, but neither had a moment to reach for it as the three thieves ran forward, two of them brandishing the sawn-off shotguns, shoving them in people’s faces.
‘Down! Everybody down! Down!’ they shouted.
Meanwhile, the big guy who’d been in the front passenger seat of the taxi had already vaulted the counter. He was the point man, the guy who would control the room, but his first job was to get to the tellers. He knew the button for the silent alarm and the direct line to the 19th Precinct four blocks away was by the third teller’s foot. Before the woman had time to react and push it with her toe, he was already too close, pulling his own shotgun from under hi
s coat, racking a round and pointing the weapon an inch from her face.
‘Up! Get up!’ he shouted. ‘UP!’
He grabbed the woman by her hair and hauled her from her seat, dragging her around the counter and throwing her to the floor to join the others. He turned, the shotgun aimed at the other tellers, and they all rose and rushed out to the main bank floor quickly, joining everyone else face down on the polished marble, trembling.
The point man grabbed a civilian who was cowering on the floor, pulling him to his feet. The guy was young, in his late twenties and dressed for the summer in t-shirt and shorts, sunglasses and a backwards cap on his head. The point man took his shotgun and put it against the man’s jaw, who started shaking with fear in the man’s grip as the barrel of the weapon nestled in under his chin.
‘If anyone makes a sound, tries to do something stupid, I blow this guy’s head off!’ the man shouted. ‘I want this place as quiet as a church! Clear?’
No one replied. Everyone was face down on the marble, no one daring to speak or move.
‘Everybody, get your phones out,’ the point man shouted, quickly. ‘Out! Slide them across the floor. If any of you don’t and I find out, this guy’s brains will be sprayed in the air like confetti!’
The people on the floor all complied and the sound of scores of cell phones sliding across the floor echoed off the silent bank’s walls. Across the room, the other two thieves finished plasti-cuffing the two guards, pushing them face-down to the marble floor, each guard landing with an oomph as the air was knocked out of them. The bank robbers reached over and pulled each guard’s Glock pistol from their holsters and threw them over the teller counter, out of reach, the guns clattering against the wood and marble as they hit the floor.
That done, the pair ran forward to their next tasks. The man vaulted the counter and slammed open the door to the security room, rushing inside. A series of monitors were in the room, the place humming, each small screen showing a different view inside the bank and on the street. He yanked out a small white bag from the inside pocket of his doctor’s coat and started pulling out all the tapes from the monitors, dumping them in the bag one-by-one, checking the time on his wrist-watch as he did so.
Fifty seconds down.
2:10 to go.
Back inside the main floor, the woman spotted the manager cowering on the floor across the room. She moved towards him swiftly, the shotgun aimed at his head, her gloved hands around the sawn-off pistol grip.
‘Up,’ she ordered, standing over him.
He hesitated then rose, unsure.
He had good reason to be. In the same moment, she smashed the barrel of the shotgun into his face hard, breaking his nose. People started to scream, shocked at the violence.
‘Shut up! Shut the hell up’ the point man shouted, his shotgun against the hostage’s neck. ‘Or I’ll kill this man and you can decide who takes his place!’
That got them quiet. The manager had fallen to the floor, moaning and gasping with pain, blood pouring from his nose, leaking all over the clean white marble. The woman grabbed him and pulled him back to his feet with brutal strength for her size. She dragged him around the counter and towards the vault as he clutched his face, blood staining his hands and fingers and slammed him against the steel with a thud.
She put the shotgun against his groin, her finger on the trigger, her face hidden behind the surgical masks and sunglasses.
‘Open it,’ she ordered.
Two words. One shotgun.
All she needed.
Without a moment’s hesitation, the man reached for the lock with his right hand, clutching his smashed nose with his left, blood pouring out and staining the sleeve of his white shirt. He twisted the dial, trying to keep his shaking hand steady, and paused three times on the combination then paused again. It clicked. He had a key looped on a chain attached to his top pocket. She grabbed it and yanked it off violently, then hit him in the face again with the Ithaca, dropping him like a stone. He fell to the ground, covering his nose, whimpering from the second blow. He wasn’t going to be any trouble.
The woman grabbed the handle on the vault, twisted it, and pulled open the steel door. It led into a room holding a second vault, but this one had no spin-dial, just a normal lock. Rushing forward, she pushed the key inside the lock and twisted. It clicked, and she pulled the handle, opening the door to the second vault.
Inside were a series of metallic shelves, like four large filing cabinets pushed against the walls. Each shelf was packed with stacks of hundred dollar bills, bricked and banded.
She moved inside quickly. Dropping the shotgun and letting it swing back under her coat on its strap, she unzipped the front of her medic’s overalls and pulled out two large empty black bags.
Back outside on the bank floor, the point man tilted his wrist so the shotgun nestled against the hostage’s neck, and checked his watch.
‘Forty seconds!’ he called.
Inside the vault, the woman worked fast. She swept the bill stacks from the shelves straight into the bags. Once loaded, she zipped them both shut. The third man had just finished taking the tapes in the security room and rushed inside to join her, taking one of the bags and looping it over his shoulder, keeping his shotgun in his right hand and the white bag of security tapes in the other. She took the other bag and followed him, and they moved outside, pulling the vault doors shut behind them, twisting the handles, then heading towards the front door.
They paused by the exit, tucking their shotguns away under the coats, then pushing their way through the doors, left the building.
The point man checked his watch and started backing away to the door, dragging the terrified hostage with him, his gun still jammed in the guy’s neck.
‘This guy is coming with us,’ he shouted. ‘If any of you move, or we see anyone on the street in the next two minutes, he dies. DO NOT MOVE!’
He turned his back and shouldered his way through the doors, taking the hostage with him.
And suddenly, the bank was eerily quiet.
They were gone.
In the silence, everyone stayed face down, too terrified to look up or even speak. The large hand on a large clock mounted on the wall ticked forward.
9:10 am.
And across the bank, the lock on the vault clicked shut.
****
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