The Getaway (Sam Archer 2) (9 page)

‘In D.C. She couldn’t get time off.’

‘Your mother?’

‘She’s gone. Two years ago. Blood clot in her lung.’

There was a pause. Archer started to walk on towards the gate, and his father’s old friend kept pace alongside him. There was a brief silence. Then Gerry broke it.

‘You wa
nt to grab a coffee?’ he asked.

Archer looked over at him. He decided he could probably use some company, especially wi
th an old friend of his father.

Gerry read his expression and took it as affirmation.

‘C’mon, it’s on me,’ he said. ‘We’ve got some catching up to do.’

Twenty minutes later, they were inside a Starbucks coffee shop in
Manhattan
, on the corner of 35
th
and
7
th
Avenue
. Gerry had driven them here. Inside the Bureau car, Archer had watched the streets flash past through the tinted windows of the black Mercedes as they drove through
Astoria
, over the Queensborough and then into
Manhattan
. Traffic was lighter considering it was the weekend and the journey was a relatively quick one, but neither man said a word during the ride. They were saving the conversation for over coffee.

Once Gerrard had parked near
Herald Square
and put a Bureau marker on the dashboard that would save him from being clamped, they had walked over and moved inside the coffee shop. Gerrard headed to the counter whilst Archer grabbed them a seat and a table across the room by the window, asking for tea instead of coffee. He couldn’t abide the black stuff. Once Gerrard had placed their order, the barista took a few moments to prepare the drinks then passed them over the counter. Gerrard paid and approached the table, taking a seat across from the younger man and placing the two cups on the table-top. Archer noticed that the older man had brought something with him from the car, an A4 sized yellow folder containing some white documents. He nodded
thanks
for his drink.

More silence followed. Archer looked out of the window, lost in thought, watching people walk past on the sunny street. Much like yesterday, today just felt surreal, as if it was a dream.

‘You’re looking well kid. Your dad said you’d ended up a cop in the
UK
?’ Gerrard asked.

‘Yeah. That’s right.’

‘Forget that, you should be a damn model with a face like that,’ the older man add
ed, trying to lighten the mood.

Archer fo
rced a smile, but said nothing.

‘Where are you staying?’

‘Marriott.
Times Square
.’

Gerrard whistled. ‘Who’s picking up the bill?’

‘My boss.’

Gerrard went to say more, but suddenly remembered something, and reached into his pocket, pulling out a pair of keys wrapped in a small piece of paper. He slid them across the table
.

‘These are for your Dad’s place in
Astoria
,’ he said. ‘He’d been renting an apartment off
30
th
Avenue
for the past few years. I figured there might be some stuff there you wanted to…see. He was on a lease so there’ll be new tenants moving in there soon. I figured you’d be the best person to take what you want and leave the rest to be thrown out. The address is on the paper.’

Archer nodded and took the keys and scrap of paper, tucking them into his pocket, saying nothing. Light guitar music flowed from speakers around the Starbucks, filling the moments of silence between the two men, and people chatted and tapped away on laptops around them, all sorts of ethnicities enjoying all sorts of different drinks and specials from the counter. It was busy with weekend activity, but the
coffee shop still felt relaxed.

Archer looked down at his tea, at the circular green Starbucks logo printed on the side of the cup. A mermaid wearing a crown, two stars either side of her, with the company’s name printed in a semi-ci
rcular shape underneath.

‘Shit, I’m sorry, Sam,’ Gerrard said, sighing. ‘Jimmy didn’t deserve to go out like that.’

‘No. He didn’t.’

‘When was the last time you saw him?’

Archer glanced out the window.

‘About eleven years ago.’

‘He always talked about you, you know. He was proud. That terrorist thing in
London
at Christmas? He wouldn’t stop going on about it. It made the front page of the New York Times. When it was over, he kept saying
that’s my son
,
my son did that.
He was real proud of you,
you know.’

‘No. I didn’t know.’

There was a pause.

Archer loosened the long black tie around his neck and unbuttoned his top button, then lifted the white cap off his tea. Steam swirled up from the cup, the water tinted and infused. He lifted the string on the bag and dunked it up and down, watching the water darken as it soaked up
the tea leaves inside the bag.

He dropped the bag inside and watched it sink
to
the bottom. His mood felt just as low.

‘I know he screwed up,’ Gerrard said. ‘Made some mistakes. But he turned his life around, Sam. He quit the booze. He joined the Bureau. Neither one is easy to do. He hadn’t taken a sip in almost two years.’

Archer listened but didn’t respond. He looked back out the window again, at the people walking past on the street, each wit
h their own cares and concerns.

There was such a wide variety of people out there. Tourists distracted as they looked at maps and tried to establish their bearings, looking for the way to Macy’s or the
Empire
State
Building
over on 34
th
and 5
th
. Locals accustomed to the sights
,
dodging and stepping past them. A young street busker on the corner, singing and strumming a guitar, people tossing the odd coin or spare dollar note into the open guitar case beside him. This place really was a melting pot. If he took a photo right now, he could probably point out about fifteen or
twenty different nationalities.

But despite the wandering meander of his mind, a voice was constantly echoing in there, a v
oice he couldn’t shake, as if
someone had shouted into a cave and three words
kept reverberating back to him.

The echo was saying the same thing over and over agai
n, three words, five syllables.

Someone murdered him
.

‘How long are you in town for?’ Gerrard asked.

‘Till next Sunday. A week tomorrow,’ Archer s
aid.

He shifted his gaze from the window to Gerrard,
sensing something in his voice.

He
looked like he had more to say.

‘Why?’

‘Did you speak to anyone about the murder?
Or read the coroner’s report?’

‘No. But I know what happened. Twelve gauge, point blank, back of the skull. Took most of his head
off. No suspects, no witnesses. T
he
FBI is handling the
investigation
and
i
t
s going
absolutely
nowhere. Why?’

Gerrard
looked across the table at him.

Didn’t speak.

‘Why, Gerry?’ Archer repeated, his face hardening. ‘Don’t waste my time.’

Gerrard nodded.

‘Because I think I know wh
o pulled the trigger,’ he said.

FIVE

‘Do you know when the first documented bank robbery in
New York City
took place?’ Gerrard asked.

Archer shook his head, watching the other man closely. He considered cutting in and pressing Gerrard for the information he wanted immediately, but figured
this had to be related somehow.

‘No. I don’t.’

‘1831. City Bank, on Wall Street. Workers turned up on Monday morning and found two hundred and fifty thousand dollars missing. To this day, we’ve only got back about three quarters of that cash haul. And it’s been them versus us ever since. It
started with steam trains and Federal
reserves, now its armoured trucks and bank vaults. Cops and robbers, Butch and Sundance, Jesse James, Bonnie and
Clyde
, you know the names. We all do. I’m head of a Violent Crimes detail downtown in
Federal
Plaza
. A six man team, including myself, in a squad called the Bank Robbery Task Force. We’re in charge of all the major bank robbery investigations in
New York City
,
in each of the five boroughs.’

He cast his arm
in the direction of the window.

‘This place is a dream target for bank robbers, Sam. There are thousands of banks here, endless escape routes and the wealth of this city means thieves know every bank is guaranteed to be stocked up with cash.’

He paused to drink from his coffee, then continued.

‘Most people who try to hold up banks are either incredibly dumb or incredibly desperate. They don’t think clearly or rationally. No disguises, no weapons, no real plan. Every witness inside the bank can I.D them later, and even if they can’t
,
every security camera in the building documents the whole thing. Some of the more stupid thieves even look up, staring straight into the lens, no mask, no disguise. No common sense. No chance of success.’

Archer drank from his tea and nodded, watching the older man closely.

‘The most common M.O is a note-job, where a thief will slide a note to the teller,’ Gerrard continued. ‘On the paper, they write
Give me all the cash in the register or I’ll shoot you
, shit like that. Tellers have a protocol for this. They always hand over the cash, but most of them have panic-buttons by their feet, silent-alarms that go straight to the NYPD. They push that whilst stalling and complying with the robber’s demands, and the thief will walk outside to find an entire police precinct waiting for him. And if the teller doesn’t have a panic button within reach, they’ll hand over the cash but include bait money or dye packs deliberately camouflaged and placed within reach. Once the thief tries to leave, a transmitter reacts with a radio by the door and detonates the dye. The money is ruined, and the thief is covered with the red dye which is an absolute bitch to get off. They’ll spend the next three days trying to scrub it off their skin, and by the third day pretty much every one of
them is doing it in handcuffs.’

He shook his head.

‘Most of these people are complete clowns. The NYPD gets pretty much all of
them the same day as the heists and retrieve
the stolen cash. Those security protocols I mentioned have been incredibly effective, especially in this city. At the end of the last decade, things were going real good. Our clearance rate was going up and up, and the heists were going down. In 1979, the Bureau logged 319 separate incidents of bank robbery in the five boroughs of
New York City
. By 2010, there were only 26.’

He paused, sipping his coffee again. Archer listened closely, intrigued.

‘Any bank robbery in the Unites States is classed as a
Federal
crime, which means we automatically get involved and take over jurisdiction,’ Gerrard said. ‘We normally work together with local law enforcement and put together a team of FBI agents and local P.D in each town and city. We had the same thing going here, but things were going so well that the NYPD decided to pull their guys from the Task Force. We were six-and-six, half cops, half FBI. Well
,
the cops pulled
their six guys from the detail,
leaving our si
x FBI agents to handle the case
load themselves. They claimed that the crimes would continue to dwindle and that surely the FBI could handle the
reduced number
of heists alone.’

‘Getting out when
the going’s good,’ Archer said.

Gerrard nodded. ‘Exactly. They jumped ship. And since then, pretty much everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. It’s just been one thing after another. We’re in some seriously deep shit and it’s rising every day. The thefts are back on the rise, all over the city. And the people pulling the jobs are getting smarter. Even the idiots now know what to look for. Things got so bad last year that the Bureau pulled me from
Washington
and sent me up here to take over the Task Force and boost the clearance rate. Start catching these guys instead of constantly chasing after them.’

‘So have you?’ Archer asked.

Gerrard sighed and shook his head.