“It’s certainly an impressive setup.”
At these words, Rigby came as close to smiling as she imagined he had ever done in his life and she sensed that their earlier disagreement had temporarily, at least, vanished from his mind.
“Ma’am, I’m proud to say this installation is more secure than most of our missile silos. We’re in the middle of a fully manned army base. We have our own power plant, water system, and strategic food reserves. We have twenty-four-seven, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree surveillance. Nothing gets in or out of here that isn’t meant to.”
They stepped inside the vault and walked along a narrow metal platform to the elevator that took them with a low-pitched whine down to the basement vault floor. Rigby held the gate open for them. Jennifer looked slowly around her.
The room was like a massive warehouse, consisting of two floors built around the central space in which they were now standing. Each floor was divided into compartments with thick steel bars separating and enclosing the top of each compartment, so that they looked like a series of huge cages. And within each compartment, stacked from floor to ceiling, were thousands upon thousands of gold bars.
It took her a few seconds to realize that she was unconsciously holding her breath; fearful, perhaps, that the sound of her breathing might rouse the slumbering dragon who must surely be guarding such a fairy-tale treasure.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Sheppard winked. “It still hits me right here every time I see it.” He clutched a clenched fist to his chest as Jennifer nodded silently. The gold was everywhere she looked, glowing and alive; a huge dull mass pulsing rhythmically in the flicker of the lights like the beat of a powerful heart.
“We have small shipments going in and out of the facility all the time.” Rigby cut into her thoughts, pointing at three large silver containers standing in the middle of the room, each about four feet long, two feet wide, and three feet high with the U.S. Treasury seal emblazoned across the front. “This is what the bullion is transported in. These are due to go out this afternoon.”
“Right.” She nodded, smiling. Complimenting his facility seemed to have transformed Rigby into the very model of interagency cooperation.
“But the items you requested to see are over here.” He led her toward a compartment on the far left of the room. As she drew closer, she could see that it seemed a little less full than the other cages and contained boxes and briefcases and files.
“As you can see,” said Rigby, holding up a large metal tag that was fixed to the door of the compartment, “each of the thirty-four compartments is sealed. When any seal is broken, the compartment’s contents are re-inventoried and resealed by the U.S. Mint.”
He snapped the seal off and, reaching into his pocket for a key, unlocked the cage and stepped in. He emerged a few moments later holding a thin aluminium briefcase that he held out to Jennifer with a nod.
“I believe that this is what you came for.”
“I’ll open it down here.”
“As you wish.”
Rigby carried the case over to one of the containers and placed it down flat on its side, its catches facing Jennifer. She reached forward and flicked the catches open, the noise echoing through the room like rifle shots. Imperceptibly, Sheppard and Rigby moved around to stand on either side of her.
She opened the case, only to find another smaller box, about eight inches long and six inches wide, inside it. It was covered in dark-blue velvet that had worn away around the corners, leaving them bald and frayed. The top had been stamped with the gold seal of the U.S. Treasury, now faded and dull.
Jennifer gently removed the box from the case and pressed the small gold catch that released the lid, her throat suddenly dry and tight. The lid snapped up, revealing an interior lined in creamy white silk that had been fashioned to snugly house five large coins, two along the top, three along the bottom.
But the box was empty.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Cindy and Pete Roscoe were enjoying themselves. London had been impressive, Paris beautiful, but Amsterdam was fun. The coffee shops, the girls in the windows, the canals. It was as different from Tulsa, Oklahoma, as it was possible to be. Hell, the concierge at their hotel had even tried to sell them some pot. They’d both pretended to be shocked but secretly they were pleased. It had made their trip seem somehow more authentic.
Amsterdam was also a special place for Cindy, whose grandparents had fled from Holland in the 1930s. She had endured an emotional visit to Anne Frank’s house the day before.
“That poor, sweet girl,” she had sobbed into Pete’s strong arms, her mascara dissolving into spidery streaks across her face as the other tourists thronged around them.
Today was their last day and after a fortnight of trekking through museums and across cities, they had agreed that a relaxing guided tour around the canals was the perfect way to round off their trip before the long flight home. Ten minutes in, clad in matching Dallas Cowboys jackets with the open-topped canal boat slicing through the city and the tour guide pointing out the various sights, they knew that it had been a great idea.
Cindy, as usual, was armed with a guidebook of biblical proportions, a parting gift from her emotional mother at the airport that she now believed to be the gospel on all things European. Such was her faith in its pronouncements that she had developed an annoying habit of matching any guide’s commentary to that of her book and then whispering to Pete if they got something wrong or, even worse, omitted some crucial fact.
Pete, meanwhile, had mastered a knack of nodding and making the appropriate noises while only half listening to his wife. His priority, instead, was to capture as much of their trip as possible on film. So while Cindy had her nose buried in a book, Pete had his eye firmly glued to the viewfinder of the tiny digital video camera that nestled in his broad hands.
Since they had been in Europe, Pete had developed his own dizzying cinematic style as his camera swooped up and down buildings, or suddenly panned in or out, the image uncertain and jumpy. This time, as they went under a bridge, Pete attempted a particularly ambitious shot, zooming out from the detail at the top of a building down to a wide-angle shot of the canal. He then tracked slowly across, until he had framed the rows of seats ahead of him and the tour guide standing right at the front of the canal boat. He smiled. She was cute.
Suddenly, something at the edge of the viewfinder caught his eye. An ex-cop, Pete had learned to recognize when things did not look quite right and instinctively he moved the camera to the right so that the tour guide’s face now only took up half the screen.
It was not the agitated man with the tanned face and the shaved head in the phone booth just before the next bridge who looked out of place, but rather the two men in dark suits that had just stepped out of the large black Range Rover and were walking toward him. There was a repressed energy in their walk, an assured confidence in their manner that reminded Pete of a dog walking at the very limit of its leash, tugging on its owner’s arm. These two were about to cut themselves loose.
He zoomed in on the phone booth, past the tour guide’s face, just as the man in it saw the two approaching figures. The phone instantly fell out of his hand and his head jerked from side to side, as he weighed his options. But Pete could see that he’d noticed them too late. Hemmed in by the phone booth on one side and the men on the other, he clearly had nowhere to go.
The two men approached the phone booth and their backs came together like heavy black curtains as they reached the man, blocking Pete’s view. He kept the camera trained on them, hardly daring to blink in case he missed something. Suddenly their shoulders parted and Pete got a glimpse of the man, his eyes wide with terror, a hand pressed over his mouth to stifle his screams. An arm was raised and a long serrated blade flashed in the sun, hovering for a few seconds, its shiny surface silhouetted against the cobalt sky, before swooping down and diving into the man’s chest. He collapsed, lifeless.