Brain Storm (2 page)

Through the bank's hazy tempered-glass doors, he watched the activity around the white van.

The young blond man had remained behind the steering wheel for the better part of an hour, staring down pedestrians with his steely blue gaze. Only when another car pulled up into the cordoned area behind the van did the van driver exit the cab. He and the driver of the new vehicle stood together by the side of the large white truck. Their matching suits made them look like twins.

Andy tore his eyes away from the sidewalk and feigned interest in a document in his hand. The columns of numbers and dry words ran together in an incoherent jumble.

He looked back out the door. Several more men had joined the first two. They stood, glancing up and down the street nervously, as the man from the car spoke instructions to each of them in turn.

Every now and then, one of the newest arrivals would glance toward the bank entrance. Even though Andy was certain that the glare of the late-morning sun reflecting off the black-tinted main doors would be enough to shield him from view, he nonetheless felt himself growing more nervous with each subsequent glance.

What were those guys up to?

His hand began to snake toward the phone, ready to alert security to the suspicious activity on the sidewalk out front, when something suddenly popped into view. Walked into view, more accurately.

Somebody had come over from the main bank

floor, positioning himself before Andy Frost's desk and blocking his view of the men on the sidewalk.

Andy leaned to one side, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever was going on outside.

"Excuse me," said a precise voice that reminded Andy of his grammar-school English teacher, Mr.

Henry.

He could no longer see the men on the sidewalk.

Andy leaned the other way, but his line of sight was still blocked.

"Excuse me," the voice repeated. It was somewhat nasal and parched, as if the speaker's larynx had been soaked in a gallon of grapefruit juice and left to dry on a desert rock.

Andy looked up, exasperated. "Yes. What?" he demanded.

"There is an error in my account."

Andy rolled his eyes. Just another mindless questioner. He was going to kill his supervisor if he wasn't moved into a cubicle soon.

"This is the mortgage desk, sir," Andy said in an icy tone.

"I realize that. But there is a discrepancy in my personal account that I wish to correct, and the lines at the teller windows are intolerably long. You seemed not to be busy."

The group of men on the sidewalk were quickly forgotten. With as much agitation as decorum would allow, Andy stared up at the old man standing before his desk.

4'Sir, I am certain that any of our tellers are more than qualified to help you with your little problem."

"Perhaps," said the older man, "and I ordinarily would not mind waiting in line. But I have left my car in a nearby garage and if I do not return within the next fifteen minutes, I will be charged the day rate. I am certain it will not take you long." The old man offered Andy one of the brand-new Butler bankbooks, first remembering to remove an ancient plastic cover that was yellowed from long use.

Andy sighed audibly. As if he didn't have enough to worry about, what with having to pick up his parents on the busiest street in the world at the busiest time of the day, he was now reduced to checking on some old codger's passbook. The guy had probably just forgotten to add the interest payment from the previous month. Andy didn't want to count how many times he had seen that particular mistake when he was a teller. He snatched the bankbook from the gentleman at his desk, noticing for the first time that the old man's skin was the color of a sickly fish belly, and started to rise from his seat.

Andy froze in midmovement.

"Nobody move," a too cheerful voice shouted from over near the main entrance.

Andy could see that the two men—the young

blond man and the later arrival—were standing at the bank entrance. The others, a larger group, were circulating through the bank, sweeping in around the velvet-roped queue and up to the bulletproof teller windows.

A robbery!

Damn! Andy thought. I should have alerted the security guards.

He'd known something was up earlier. If he hadn't been distracted by the old man, Andy would have called the manager, maybe gotten the police involved. He would have been a hero, but instead he was going to become just another hostage if this thing played out the way most of these daylight robberies did.

Worse, if he was late tonight, his dad would slaughter him.

Andy started to sit back down, determined to remain as inconspicuous as possible and hopefully to get through this thing in one piece. That was when the sudden realization hit him. He couldn't move.

Andy tried forcing himself to sit down. His legs wouldn't budge. He tried pushing them into place with his arms. He realized with a sinking feeling that his upper torso was frozen in place, as well.

Andy was locked in an awkward squatting position just above the seat of his vinyl junior-executive's chair.

He tried harder but found that it was no use. He was a human rock.

And, he soon discovered, he wasn't alone.

As Andy's frightened eyes darted helplessly around the bank interior, he found that the only people who seemed to be moving were the thieves. Each member of the larger group had taken up a post at every teller window, most standing directly in front of bank patrons, who for some inexplicable reason remained as motionless as statues. Not only that, but all of the normal extraneous sounds of people talking, coughing, shifting from foot to foot—indeed, all sounds save those of the robbers themselves—had ceased at the precise instant the main thief had first spoken.

Everyone within the bank—employees and patrons alike—was as helpless as a mannequin.

At one window, an old woman was standing too close for a robber to access the teller window. The man simply picked the woman up as if she were nothing more than a piece of wicker furniture and set her down over near the head of the line. Though her eyes darted wildly in every direction, the rest of her might have been carved in stone.

"Of course, that was an unreasonable demand,"

the cheerful voice of the head robber said into the silence of the frozen bank lobby. As he spoke, he moved toward the center of the lobby. The blond man remained dutifully behind, a loyal sentry at the bank entrance. "For an operation of this kind to work, there has to be some movement, obviously."

As if his words were some sort of prearranged cue, the tellers began reaching into their cash drawers and stuffing bills into bags that were handed over by the thieves. They moved like automatons, with simultaneous motions. Hands entered cash drawers, money was removed, hands entered bags, repeat. It was a flawless series of movements, seemingly more precise than the most meticulously rehearsed Broadway dance number. When the tellers were finished, they shoved the bags through the narrow slots beneath the bulletproof partitions and snapped to attention behind the windows as if awaiting further instructions.

Watching the entire procedure from a squatting position behind his desk and unable to move a muscle, Andy, in some lucid part of his mind, was struck by the surrealism of the entire procedure. It was an eerie tableau, as if everyone inside the bank were some sort of dusty museum exhibit demonstrating modern banking techniques.

Andy caught a hint of movement before him and shifted his eyes—which seemed about all he could move—in that direction. He had forgotten about his customer. The old man was standing stock-still before his desk, frozen like everyone else.

Not entirely, it seemed.

Faintly, so much so that it was barely detectable, the old man was swaying from side to side. Also, as Andy watched, there seemed to be a slight trace of movement at the tips of the man's slender gray fingers.

Andy's attention was distracted in the next minute when his legs suddenly buckled. He fell roughly back into his chair, dropping the old man's passbook to his desk blotter.

All around the bank, patrons suddenly began to stir as if some huge unseen switch had been activated.

Tellers backed away from their windows. Bank patrons stood nervously in place, eyeing the robbers, who seemed themselves at a loss for what to do next.

The men looked suddenly panicked, as if the thought that anyone in the bank would be able to move had never occurred to them.

For the first time, Andy noticed that none of them carried guns.

Andy looked beyond the old man in front of him toward the street, where he fervently hoped that an NYPD SWAT team was positioned to take out the robbers. All he saw beyond the large white van was a pizza delivery truck stuck in late-morning traffic, a giant CB antenna bobbing impatiently from its roof.

Suddenly a command cracked through the air.

"Okay, hold it right where you are!"

Bank security. There were three green-suited guards standing around the lobby, their guns drawn and trained toward the largest concentrations of thieves.

The leader held his hands high above his head.

"I'm certain that this is just a misunderstanding, sir," he said tightly. He tried to force the cheerful-ness of a moment before, but the words sounded terse. He glanced impatiently out toward the parked van. Andy noticed that he wore a hearing aid.

"Shut up!" the head of the Butler Bank security force ordered. "Down on the floor, hands behind your heads! Now!"

The man looked back from the door, eyeing the guard balefully. "Do you have any idea how much this suit cost?" he asked. He shot another glance toward the bank entrance. The traffic seemed to be picking up. The pizza truck had moved a car length down the street.

"Down! Now!"

The robbers were beginning to comply. They dropped to their knees, all the while watching their leader expectantly. The man refused to move an inch.

The pizza truck drove away.

Andy felt an odd tingling sensation at the back of his head.

It was a sort of tickle, as if someone had brushed his neck with a feather. The sensation made his ears itch.

The robber turned victoriously back toward the guard. With a boldness that was surely suicidally motivated, the man strode purposefully up to the guard and, wrapping his fingers around the barrel of the gun, tugged the weapon from the guard's out-stretched hand. The guard didn't react, didn't move an inch.

With obvious relish, the robber tucked the gun back into the guard's holster. Frozen once more, the other two security men watched helplessly as the same procedure was repeated with them.

Andy tried to move but realized that he, too, was immobile. All around the bank, patrons and employees alike were once again rooted to wherever they stood.

Bags of money in hand, the robbers clustered around their leader in the center of the lobby. Some people were staring stonily off in other directions, but most were looking in the general direction of the thieves, their eyes darting helplessly from side to side. Drool leaked from one man's parted lips.

The lead thief grinned triumphantly around the lobby of the bank.

"And now, with your kind assistance, gentlemen..." With a nod from their leader, the thieves began to circulate through the frozen crowd.

This was it. They were going to start killing people. Or worse.

All thoughts of his dreaded commute were ban-ished from Andy's mind as one of the thieves—a sinister-looking man in his forties—approached his desk. He reached into the money bag he had taken from one of the teller windows and, stuffing his hand deep inside, proceeded to remove a handful of bills.

As the young mortgage officer watched in disbelief, the thief stuffed the wad of bills into the pocket of the old man in front of Andy's desk. Moving on, he found a patron who was standing nearer the door and went through the same motions.

Eyes straining to catch every movement at the limits of his peripheral vision, Andy saw the other thieves stuffing money into satchels and jacket pockets. While they seemed to carry out this task grudgingly, their leader performed it with unreserved joy.

One bank patron was dressed in only jeans and a T-shirt, but the gang leader carefully wrapped up a tight roll of crisp new fifty-dollar bills and tucked it neatly into the pocket of the man's torn shirt.

Oddly the Butler Bank employees seemed to be the only ones who were left out of this bizarre re-distribution of wealth.

When all was done and the bags were once more empty, the thieves clustered back around their leader.

There was something cultured, almost regal about him. He raised his hand in a casual gesture that would have made the Queen of England feel as if she'd just rolled off the back of a turnip truck.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he called happily to the crowd. "My name is Lothar Holz, and you have just been privileged to witness the premier nonlaboratory test of PlattDeutsche, America's Dynamic Interface System."

Andy felt the strange sensation at the back of his head return. He realized immediately that he could move. All around the bank, patrons and employees alike were coming to the same conclusion. The guards were in the process of unholstering their weapons once more, but Andy saw that the bank president, Clive Butler, trailed by a clutch of VPs, had entered the lobby from the rear elevator and was now circulating among the crowd, calming concerns and exhorting employees not to succumb to panic.

A smattering of applause went up around the man who identified himself as Lothar Holz, led by the blond man at the door and the rest of the robbers.

They were joined in their enthusiasm by Clive Butler and the other executives. With the urging of the suits from upstairs, it wasn't long before all of the junior employees were applauding the man who moments before had brought terror to an otherwise ordinary day. Amazingly most of the bank customers also joined in. It was a classic example of mob mentality, de-duced Andy, though he suspected that their enthusiasm for the would-be robber was mostly motivated by the cash in their pockets.