The Getaway (Sam Archer 2)

The Getaway

Copyright: Tom Barber

Published: 29
th
June
2012

The right of Tom Barber to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by he in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

To all my friends in
Astoria
and at the Esper Studio.

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 80’s, 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 and also that the journey into work was 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
2
nd
Avenue
between 62
nd
and 63
rd
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 the quality of the service found when you stepped through their doors. They were renowned as one of the most reliable and dependable banks out there, and it was a reputatio
n they had worked hard to earn.

On that summer day it was also the last Monday of the month, August, and that meant somethin
g 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 fortresses and military bunkers, and were the kind of places to give bank robbers nightmares. But
for
those twenty minutes or so each month whenever cash was delivered
,
each bank
was
momentarily vulnerable and their collective managers
were secretly
on edge, despite th
eir 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 employment 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 vehicl
es 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 gr
eat 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 both 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 of getting held up or confronted on the street. 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 whilst 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 truck, glancing left and right down the sunny sidewalk either side of him. 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 look each side at the streets and neighbourhood around him, he shook off his unease as he grabbed the door handle and pulled it open.
All this tension is unnecessary
, he told himself. 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
bank robbers and 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 ma
n entered the bank. They were sit
t
ing
in a yellow NYC taxi cab, pulled up on the street corner between 63
rd
and 64
th
, 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. Anyone who passed it paid no heed to the vehicle. It was inconspicuous and attracted no extra attention, just another normal part of everyday
New York
life and scenery, as common as p
izza 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 any unwanted fingerprints that could be left on any of the equipment or clothing they used. Over the medic uniforms, three of them wer
e also wearing white doctor
s
’
overcoats, the kind a GP or a chemist would wear in a lab, also fresh from the packets. The driver wasn’t wearing one of the coats. He was staying in the car and wouldn’t need one.

The outfits were crisp and clean, covering every possible source of convicting DNA, not a speck or stain on any part or any piece of the white fabric. If anyone looked at them for longer than a few seconds on the street, 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 glancing or wandering eye, the clothing wouldn’t cast suspicion. There were much stranger and wackier outfits being worn across the city at that very moment, outfit
s far more peculiar than these.

All the dramatic costumes were for the movies, or for amateurs for whom it was just a matter
of time before they got caught.

A bank robber wanted to blend in, not stand out.

Beside the driver, the guy in the front pa
ssenger seat checked his watch.

9:04 am.

He glanced up at the
front door of the Chase branch.

No s
ign of the guard returning yet.

And inside the bank, the time lock on the vault would
be off for another six minutes.

The world-wide back and forth battle between banks and thieves over 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 had discovered the steel vaults fully intact. And when they got each one open, they also found that all the money inside was completely unharmed, whilst 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 vaul
t still wouldn’t open outside
this
fortnightly ten-minute window.