Operation Breakthrough (2 page)

“Now what?” Erikson asked tensely. We could hear the sound of running feet outside the vault entrance. I could picture the watchman, perplexed at the sudden explosion of sound, checking to make sure it was unopened. And being relieved to find the status quo.

“We wait,” I told Erikson.

“Like rabbits in a snare?” he demanded. He sounded as though he didn’t care much for the idea.

“Like pigs in clover,” I tried to soothe him. “Until they search the building and satisfy themselves there’s nothing wrong. There never was an alarm system in the world that didn’t kick itself off accidentally at some time or other, and eventually the security guards and the police will conclude that’s what happened now.”

Erikson shook his head dubiously. More voices could be heard outside the vault. They seemed to be shouting at each other. Some were close to the vault door, and some sounded as though they were reaching us through the hole in the wall of the elevator shaft. This was confirmed when the elevator started upward suddenly with a grinding noise.

When it was a floor above us, I leaned out through the hole in the vault’s steel liner and aimed my light downward into the shaft. The debris at the bottom didn’t appear at all unusual. There’s often a lot of construction rubble at the base of such shafts, and this one had obviously had quite a bit before we added our contribution to it. Bricks, boards, mortar, and miscellaneous waste surrounded the large shock absorber in the pit.

Excited voices aboard the elevator harangued each other in rich British accents. “Search all floors immediately!” an authoritative, clipped voice commanded brusquely. The elevator rose still higher, and we could hear voices rising and falling as the order was carried out.

I peeled off the surgeon’s rubber gloves I was wearing. My hands had been perspiring inside the thin latex, and the flesh of my fingertips felt like uncooked prunes, they were so puckered from the moisture.

Erikson was still listening intently as the voices from the shaft called back and forth to each other. “How long is this damned commotion going to last?” he asked irritably. He held an unlighted cigarette in his rubber-gloved right hand.

“Not much longer,” I said confidently. “They’ll get tired of playing Boy Scout. We’ll have plenty of time before the bank opens for business.” I beamed my light around the corners of the vault until I located a steel-strapped money chest. I sat down on it and rested my back gratefully against a wall patterned with safe deposit box drawers. “Go ahead and light up.”

“Won’t someone smell it?” he asked doubtfully. “A draft could draw the smoke through the hole you burned in the vault liner and carry it up the elevator shaft.”

“Half of them will be smoking anyhow, Karl.”

He hesitated another moment, then lit up. He spoke again after the first expelled lungful of smoke wreathed his square-chinned, bulldog features and rough-looking blond hair. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Earl. The one place they’ll never think to look for us is inside the vault itself.” He took another deep drag on his cigarette before extinguishing it and dropping the butt into his shirt pocket. “How long will it take you to get into the safe deposit boxes?”

“No time at all. Nothing like what it would take to get inside this money chest I’m sitting on.”

“We’re not here for that!” he said sharply.

“You never did tell me why we’re here,” I pointed out.

He didn’t answer me.

It hadn’t taken Karl Erikson long to get to the point when he showed up at Hazel’s ranch in the copper-mining district of eastern Nevada a month ago. Out of Hazel’s hearing he informed me that his as-always-unspecified bosses in Washington had handed him the assignment of procuring an unnamed something from a couple of safe deposit boxes in a bank vault in Nassau.

“I told them I couldn’t even consider making the attempt unless I could pick the man to go with me,” Karl said earnestly when we were alone in front of the barn where I was gassing up the rented car in which he’d driven from Reno. There’s a United flight daily from San Francisco into the Ely airport which goes on to Salt Lake City and vice versa, but if you miss them, you wait twenty-four hours. Karl Erikson didn’t have that kind of patience. “But after what happened to the Turk on our last job, the head man didn’t want to okay it when I named you,” he continued. “He finally gave in when I insisted no one else could swing the job.”

“Did you ever consider I might like the option of saying ‘No’ sometimes before you volunteer me for one of your projects?” I had asked a bit warmly.

“Ahhhhh, come on, Earl. There just isn’t anyone on our books who can match your talent for this job.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” I told him firmly.

But of course it had.

Plus the fact I owed Karl Erikson a couple of favors difficult to repay in ordinary coin.

He knew what I’d been. Not in detail, but he knew. He was a complete opportunist when it came to carrying out his orders, though, and he had no qualms about using me. Not that our prior relationship had been a one-way street. Karl Erikson drew a lot of water in the underground levels of government where he operated — a situation which in the light of my past afforded a substantial umbrella when he was on my side.

He was a hard man to say no to and make it stick. He was that truly hard-to-find individual, a dedicated man in the service of his country, and so closemouthed that it should really have been no surprise to me that I sat beside him inside a Nassau bank vault and still had no idea why we were there.

I had my own ideas, of course. If I’d still been in business for myself, Nassau was just the type of banking situation I might have taken a hard look at. Along with Switzerland, Spain, and Hong Kong it had become both a tax haven and a repository for undeclared income. There should be some juicy stacks of bills in the safe deposit boxes against which my back was resting.

The sound of voices was diminishing outside the vault. Erikson paced, not nervously but impatiently. His head was cocked to one side as he listened. “I’m curious,” he said finally, coming to a halt in front of me. “What alternative plan did you have if anything had gone wrong and we couldn’t get out of the vault before the building opened in the morning and the elevators were in use, pinning us here?”

“Simple,” I said. “I’d have jammed the vault’s timing mechanism from inside here. I’d have jammed it so badly it would have taken technicians a couple of days to open the twenty-ton door. If the bank personnel couldn’t open the door, they couldn’t know we were here, and we’d have gone out over the roof again after the building closed tonight. You said the plane would be showing up once every twenty-four hours for three days, so we’d just have been set back a day. That’s the only thing that could have gone wrong.”

“Speaking of things going wrong,” Erikson said. “If only one of us makes it in the plane to Andrews Field in Washington, we’re to meet a man named Baker and turn the material over to him. He’ll be there each of the next three days from 8:00 to 8:10
A.M.
”

I waved it aside. “The only thing that bothers me is that we’ve got to hide out for a day now before the plane shows up and this is a damned small island.”

“Eighty square miles,” Erikson said soberly.

“Oh well, we’ve made up before for shortcomings of the Washington brain bank,” I philosophized. “We’ll manage this time, too.”

“Nothing like working with a professional,” Erikson said drily. There were no sounds now from outside the vault. “Are we ready?”

“Relax. Let’s give the police time to get back in the sack after giving the security people hell for rousting them out.”

We both fell silent. For half an hour the only sound inside the vault was our breathing. Finally I stood up, drawing on my rubber gloves again. “Okay,” I said. “What are we after?”

Erikson took my thin-beamed light and shined it on the rows of safe deposit boxes. The beam traveled in a short arc, returned, then repeated its passage. “These three,” Erikson said. “Numbers C-114, C-115, and C-116.”

I moved in more closely and examined the twin locks on the boxes. They were quite ordinary. Who puts expensive locks on safe deposit boxes inside a vault? Not the banks in Nassau, anyway.

“No problem,” I assured Erikson. I went to our equipment and selected a U-shaped steel punch. I picked up a ball-peen hammer also and then approached the boxes again.

Speed was important now because the next noise we made was going to convince an already nervous watchman that things weren’t kosher. I hoped he was stationed close to the vault door where the thicknesses of steel and solid concrete would help to muffle noise. If the police had left a second man in the lobby near the elevator doors, there was no way he could miss hearing us. There was nothing we could do about it except move fast.

I positioned the punch over the twin lock of box C-114, took a short grip on the hammer, and swung it hard. The contact sounded like a bomb going off in the confined space of the vault. The box drawer sagged open drunkenly, its lock mechanism pulverized.

Erikson shook his head. “I thought Jock McLaren was good with locks, but he could go to your school.” He lifted the cover from the box and began to scoop its contents into a small canvas sack. The contents seemed to be mostly loose papers and not too many of them.

Jock McLaren was one of Erikson’s men who had been with us at the finale when a fat Turk took an unhealthy interest in an AEC shipment from Hanford, Washington, that was being trucked across the country. “Seen Jock lately?” I asked as I placed the punch over the lock of C-115. BOOOOONNNNNGGGG! The box sprang open.

“I had dinner with him and his wife a few weeks ago at their home in Arlington, Virginia,” Erikson said as he rifled the second box.

C-116 required two blows from the hammer instead of one. Otherwise the results were the same. It was like poking three winners in a row from a huge punchboard. “That’s it?” I asked Erikson as he flattened papers inside the canvas sack to make it more manageable.

“That’s it.” He knotted a cord around the neck of the sack, which bulged hardly at all.

There had been no sound from outside the vault. The whole affair hardly seemed worth the trouble. I looked with regret at the rows and rows of additional boxes and the money chests scattered around the floor of the vault. “You sure we’re not mad at this bank? It could be a hell of a nice touch.”

“We’re ready to leave,” Erikson said emphatically.

“You’re the doctor,” I surrendered. “Don’t bother about the tools. We won’t be taking most of them. Don’t forget to write off the expense on your next income tax return.”

Erikson snorted as I selected a screwdriver and an eighteen-inch crowbar from the tools on the floor and returned to the entrance hole we’d made in the back of the vault. The magnets I’d used to hold the elevator’s loosened back wall panel in place were too strong for me to pull away with my hands, but I pried them free with the crowbar. I shoved the panel out of the way.

I stepped up into the cab and Erikson followed right behind me. “Quietly now,” I cautioned. “Anyone listening can hear us a lot more plainly in this thing than through the vault thicknesses.”

I reached above my head to push open the emergency door in the elevator roof, then froze. Just above my up-stretched hands the elevator light still glowed, and it illuminated brilliantly the two-way fixture I’d installed to provide both light and a power source.

Erikson saw the direction of my glance, and his brow corrugated when he spotted the fixture. “Goddamnit,” he said softly, “I forgot to take it out. Of all the stupid — ”

“I should have reminded you,” I cut in.

“I shouldn’t have needed to be reminded!” he growled. “You told me the cab had to look as though no one had been aboard it. I could have blown the whole bit by forgetting to remove that fixture.”

A sharp-eyed cop could certainly have earned himself a promotion. I wondered uneasily if a sharp-eyed cop
was
going to earn himself a promotion. If the tell-tale fixture had been noticed and the roof of the bank building and the street outside were staked out by silent, waiting Bahamian police …

I reached under my jacket and loosened my .38 in its shoulder holster. “There’s going to be one hell of a scramble if the police are waiting for us on the roof, Karl. I think we’d better — ”

A smashing blow on the muscle of my right arm numbed the arm and slammed me up against the side of the elevator cab. Karl Erikson’s big hand snaked inside my jacket and emerged with my .38. “No shooting!” he said harshly.

“No shooting?” I echoed incredulously as the numbness vanished and pain flooded my entire right side. “Goddamn you, Karl, I’m not going to rot in a stinking — ”

“I said no shooting,” he repeated but in a quieter tone. “This is a friendly government. Maybe they didn’t notice anything. Get up the ladder.”

We certainly had to do that anyway. I shoved open the emergency door in the cab’s roof and pulled myself up through the opening with Erikson assisting me from below. I needed assistance; the big bastard had just about decommissioned me with one punch. I helped him up when I was standing on the elevator roof. The pain in my right arm seemed to be increasing steadily. Erikson had a fist with the impact of a jackhammer.

I transferred the screwdriver to a jacket pocket and the crowbar to a hanging loop on my vest before I started up the steel ladder. I used my left hand to pull myself upward. At the top of the shaft I unscrewed the single screw I’d left to hold the loosened piece of tin flooring, then pushed the square of metal aside.

I reached still further upward with only the upper part of my body through the opening and feet still on the ladder rungs. I could hear the sounds of Erikson’s scuffling ascent below me as I leaned forward and put a hand on the door and gently cracked open the entrance to the small structure housing the elevator mechanism.

It was still dark outside but not the total blackness of several hours before. A tinge of gray in the eastern sky hinted at the approaching dawn. Everything seemed quiet on the rooftop. I took a relieved breath and raised a foot to the next ladder rung.