Exile Hunter (29 page)

“It’s all taken
care of,” the chief told them. “The Guard has sent in
reinforcements from their base at Burke Lakefront Airport.”

Linder felt momentarily
deflated at not receiving credit for his intelligence scoop. Here he
was, sitting right on top of a rebel attack on the goddamned Federal
Reserve Bank of Cleveland, just as he and Denniston had predicted,
and Bednarski was acting as if he and the Guard were taking it all in
stride.

As if sensing this, the
radio crackled back to life and Bednarski spoke again.

“Anyway, you boys
turned out to be right. So, get the hell out of there and come on
home. We’ve got a long day ahead of us.”

* * *

By afternoon, local
news broadcasts reported that insurgents had infiltrated the downtown
commercial area in vast numbers and laid siege to the Federal Reserve
Bank. While battles raged around the Fed, rebel forces captured both
the Terminal Tower and the Key Bank Tower, along with several nearby
office buildings. According to unconfirmed reports, the rebels had
moved heavy machine guns, mortars, rockets, and large quantities of
ordnance into those buildings before Ohio National Guard troops could
cordon off the area. Rather than risk heavy casualties by attempting
to retake the office towers by frontal assault, the Guard had brought
in armored vehicles and artillery and was shelling the floors from
which the rebels fired on them. This proved less than effective,
however, as the rebels moved the weapons frequently from one place to
another.

Fighter-bombers and
helicopter gunships roared overhead, but no airstrikes were ordered
until nightfall, by which time all noncombatants had been evacuated
from the downtown area. From a distance, television cameras showed
tracer shells and explosions shooting back and forth like lightning
bolts between the rebel-held towers and adjacent government-held
high-rises. Though the Ohio National Guard appeared to be gaining the
upper hand, the heart of Cleveland’s downtown commercial district
was being systematically gutted in the process.

All evening and
throughout the night, bullets and explosive shells pummeled the rebel
fighters until, by dawn, Unionist forces had retaken everything east
of East Ninth and south of Tower City, including the Flats, and were
closing in on Public Square from the north and west.

Shortly after first
light, Linder and Denniston reentered the city with Bob Bednarski as
part of a military convoy. Their first stop was the Federal Reserve
Bank, where the DSS team was relieved to learn from the commanding
Guard officer that the Fed’s defense force had repelled the
insurgents’ initial surprise assault and held out against repeated
attacks during the night from a determined and well-armed foe.

The cathedral-like
lobby of the historic bank, built in 1924, now looked like photos
Linder had seen of Berlin in 1945 or London during the Blitz. The
delicate wrought iron gates and partitions were twisted and torn
where rocket-propelled grenades had struck. The gold-veined Siena
marble walls and floors were coated with an oily residue of toxic
black smoke. The floor under the colossal central dome was littered
with chunks of stone and plaster as well as shards of glass from the
tall arched windows and weighty chandeliers.

“If you don’t mind
my asking, just how much gold and currency did you have in this place
last night?” Bednarski asked the Guard officer after hearing his
account of the nightlong battle.

“I’m sorry, but I
can’t answer that, Colonel,” the officer replied. “It’s
outside my need to know. But I can tell you this: the Fed holds a
great deal more currency and coin in the vault now than it did before
the Events. With so many ATMs down and the Internet all screwed up,
more transactions are conducted in cash now than at any time in the
past fifty years.”

“How about a rough
guess of what you’re sitting on in paper currency? Ten million? A
hundred million? A billion?”

“Oh, I suppose it
would be somewhere in the low hundreds of millions,” the Guard
officer ventured. “But, fortunately, we weren’t holding nearly as
much cash last night as we did earlier this week, because much of it
was delivered to the downtown commercial banks in preparation for
meeting payroll on Friday.”

“And which banks
would those be?” Bednarski asked with a note of alarm in his voice.
“Just the biggest ones—say, the top five?”

“Oh, off the top of
my head, I’d say Key Bank, of course; then Huntington Bank,
National City, U.S. Bancorp, First Merit, and perhaps the Fifth
Third. Why do you ask?”

Without responding to
the National Guard officer, Bednarski removed his mobile radio from a
holster on his belt and called the DSS duty officer back at the
Cleveland Base.

“What are we hearing
from the downtown banks, Wes?” Bednarski demanded. “Have they
checked in yet this morning? Yes, just give me Key Bank, Huntington,
National City—the big ones.”

“Please hold, sir.
I’ll check.”

A moment later, the
duty officer spoke up again.

“We have nothing from
them, sir,” the officer replied. “You may want to send messengers
over there. Each of the banks you named is within a few blocks of
your current location.”

“Which one is
closest?” Bednarski demanded.

“That would be Fifth
Third Bank. It’s right next door to you on Superior. National City
and Huntington are two blocks south, at East Ninth and Euclid.”

Bednarski thanked the
Guard officer for his briefing and led the DSS team outside. As they
made their exit, he ordered Linder to visit the National City Bank
and report right away by radio, while Denniston was to drop in on the
Huntington.

Linder set off at a
fast jog down East Ninth and had to take care to avoid slipping on
the treacherous layer of broken glass. When he reached the entrance,
he was surprised to find no troops or policemen outside. The lobby
was deserted, though it showed signs of fighting. By radio, he asked
Bednarski to find out from the Guard officer at the Fed where he
could locate the vault.

“Find the central
stairwell and go down two flights,” the officer told him. “It
should be somewhere under the lobby.”

Linder did as he was
told but, upon hearing an odd murmur from behind a closed door,
opened it to find a room full of bank employees lying bound and
gagged on the floor. He immediately set about cutting the plastic
loop restraints that bound the employees’ wrists and ankles, then
left his knife with one of the freed employees and followed another
to the main bank vault and the safe-deposit boxes.

Nothing could have
prepared Linder for the shock of what he saw when he entered the
anteroom to the main vault. He had expected to see the massive steel
door swinging open or perhaps even blown off its hinges, and the
cavernous vault picked clean. But the main vault door remained
securely closed. Instead, a gaping hole had been blasted in an
adjacent wall. Not only had the main vault been emptied, but the safe
deposit vault had been breached, as well, and every individual safe
deposit box drilled open and looted. The floor around the safe
deposit boxes was a complete mess, strewn ankle deep in
non-negotiable documents like property deeds, wills and trusts, birth
and marriage certificates, along with empty envelopes and containers
that had once held cash, gold, jewels and negotiable securities.

For several minutes,
Linder remained speechless as he waded through the debris. Then he
turned to his escort, a bank officer who appeared equally dazed, and
asked the question that bothered him most.

“How did they get
in?”

“Underground,” the
banker replied. “They left the same way, with everything they could
cart out.”

“When?”

“Two or three hours
ago.”

As Linder surveyed the
chaos, loud static burst forth from his two-way radio.

“Linder here,” he
answered.

“Are you inside?”
Bednarski asked.

“I’m in the
safe-deposit vault. We’re too late.”

“Why? What’s
there?”

“It’s what’s not
here,” Linder replied. “The rebels blasted their way into the
main vault and breached every last safe deposit box. They came and
went underground without anyone noticing. It’s a clean sweep.”

Bednarski kept the
transmit button on his radio depressed while he cursed aloud.

“What do you mean,
underground? Are you talking tunnels? Sewers? Subways? Nobody over
here told me anything about any goddamned tunnels. Fred!” the chief
bellowed, apparently addressing an aide within earshot, “get that
FEMA guy back in here! And send one of your people down to where
Linder is and find out how the bastards did it!”

Then he addressed
Linder.

“Does anyone know
where the tunnel leads to?” Bednarski demanded.

“Not yet,” Linder
said. “Until a few minutes ago, everyone here was all lying bound
and gagged on the floor.

“Well, find out,"
Bednarski ordered. “We need to intercept the sons of bitches. Fred,
get the Coast Guard back on the radio again and tell them to watch
for any suspicious vessels leaving the waterfront.”

“Chief, stand by,”
Linder interrupted. “I have a question for you. When you spoke to
the Coast Guard, did they say whether the rebels attacked the Guard
base and got away with any captured weapons?”

“That’s a
negative,” Bednarski replied. “The rebels never breached the
perimeter.”

“Did they attack the
Guard base in force or might it have been a feint?”

“I see what you’re
getting at, Linder. You don’t think the weapons were ever their
target, do you?”

Linder chose not to
reply. Instead, he asked, “Has Denniston checked in?”

“He’s been trying
to get through,” the Chief of Base answered. “Stand by and I’ll
ask him.”

While he waited for
Bednarski to get back to him, Linder combed through the litter on the
floor. Among the discarded papers were pieces of jewelry that Linder
thought exquisite but that apparently were fakes or otherwise failed
to meet the thieves’ standards.

A few moments later
Bednarski’s voice came back over the radio. His tone was somber.

“That was Denniston.
They hit his bank the same way. Safe deposit boxes and all. Clean as
a whistle.”

“And I’ll bet you
ten to one that these aren’t the only two banks they hit,” Linder
replied. “It looks like we’ve been duped. While our forces were
defending the Fed and battling a bunch of suicidal fanatics in the
Terminal Tower, the insurgents pulled off the greatest bank heist in
American history.”

Don’t believe, don’t fear, don’t ask.
Camp saying

LATE DECEMBER, CAMP N-320, YUKON

The pickup truck that
was to take Linder to the camp’s disciplinary unit was an hour in
coming. While Linder squatted in the snow outside Bracken’s office,
he tried to recall what a veteran prisoner had told him one night at
dinner about life in that dreaded troop. Lately, the veteran had
said, the disciplinary unit had been working to clear the Point, a
rocky outcrop that lay in the path of a proposed logging road leading
to a virgin spruce forest north of the camp. Owing to a shortage of
bulldozers, the unit’s task was to clear unwanted rock using
explosives, picks and shovels. The work was backbreaking and the pace
unremitting. The disciplinary unit was the only work team required to
work a twelve-hour day every day of the year, using headlamps or
floodlights during the long hours of winter darkness.

When the pickup
arrived, Linder’s two guards flipped a coin to determine who would
ride in the back with the prisoner and who would ride in the heated
cab with the guard dog and its handler. The loser muttered a curse
before climbing into the cargo bay, kicking Linder to move aside so
he could sit with his back against the cab to dodge the wind.

“Make a wrong move
and I’ll blast you,” the guard warned as he padlocked Linder’s
shackles to a steel rail that ran along the side of the pickup’s
cargo bed.

The pickup had
difficulty on the rutted logging road, fishtailing as the driver
gunned the engine to maintain forward momentum. When they reached the
edge of the spruce forest, the road leveled slightly as it emerged
onto a narrow shelf that hugged the side of a canyon wall. The pickup
was now a hundred feet above the canyon floor where a frozen creek
wound its way among jagged rocks.

The truck rounded a
bend and the icy road narrowed, becoming scarcely wide enough for a
big log hauler to get past. Linder, who had a pathological fear of
heights, prayed that the driver would slow down and that the truck’s
studded tires would hold through the curves.

A quarter mile further
on they came to a shelf wide enough for the pickup to turn around.
The truck stopped.

“This is it,” the
guard ordered as he dropped the tailgate and opened the padlock that
held Linder fast.

Linder followed the
guard off the truck and around the next bend in the logging road.
Some fifty meters ahead, he spotted a scattered herd of slow-moving
scarecrows in filthy orange coveralls. Some swung picks against the
jagged rock face, while others pried apart boulders with iron staves,
shoveled loose dirt and stone into rubberized canvas hods, or dragged
crude sledges laden with debris to the edge of the road before
dumping it into the ravine below. The only modern equipment in sight
was a diesel generator connected to a bank of floodlights.

At ten-yard intervals
along the road, wood fires blazed in perforated oil drums but not a
single prisoner warmed himself, as these were reserved for the
guards. A feeble-looking gray-bearded prisoner shuttled between the
fires and a disorderly woodpile to stoke the flames.

The guard led Linder
past the fires to the command hut and put his head inside the door.
Moments later a solidly built man of average height emerged wearing a
Russian-style fur hat and a government-issue parka with the insignia
of a captain in the Corrective Labor Administration. The man’s face
was hard and lean, with intelligent brown eyes and an inquiring
expression. Linder guessed his age to be in the mid-thirties and
guessed that this was Holzer, the Camp Security Officer, who presided
over the disciplinary unit.