The Getaway (Sam Archer 2) (2 page)

But despite those factors and the seemingly insurmountable odds, the four thieves inside the taxi
were cool, calm and confident.

Because they knew one unchangeable, unalterable fact.

No matter how strong any bank vault was, at some point it had to be opened.

The man in the fron
t 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 9 am, 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often withdrawn.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 thing wouldn’t open, even i
f 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, and the silent alarm dial code was one of the latest and favourite measures at their disposal.

T
he 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, givin
g 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 95
th
and 1
st
! I need back-up, goddammit! Send everyone in the area right now
!’

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. 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 checked the rear-view mirror and saw a commotion in the tra
ffic 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 19
th
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 seats 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 turne
d and saw the sudden commotion.

It took a split second for what they were seeing to fully reg
ister in their brains.

Then they reacted, some of them covering their mout
hs as others started to scream.

There were two guards in the bank, Walter Pick and George Willi
s, both retired NYPD, both sporti
ng 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 had 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 19
th
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 his coat, racking a round and pointing th
e 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 twent
ies, 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 ground.  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 saw the manager cowering on the floor across the room. She moved towards him swiftly, the shotgun aimed at his head, her gloved hands a
round the sawn-off pistol grip.

‘Up,’ she orde
red, 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 s
cream, 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 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, twisting 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 cab
inets pushed against the walls.

But 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.