Chapter1
ONE
Washington D.C. -- FBI
SO WHAT'D I
miss?"
Special Agent Neal Vanderwaal meant it as a rhetorical question. He'd just returned from the first vacation he'd taken in six years. It had only taken two days alone with his wife and kids before he couldn't wait to get back to work.
"You didn't hear?" Tom Newman, his sidekick of seven years, was staring at him in total disbelief.
"Hey man, the whole idea of a vacation is to get away from it all."
"Thirty-seven million in cash," Newman said, "from a Federal Reserve armored car."
"When?"
Newman now had Vanderwaal's complete attention. "Yesterday afternoon in Denver. You really didn't know? This one's freaky, man."
Newman made a spell-casting gesture with his hands.
"Define freaky," Vanderwaal said, as he twirled a pencil between the fingers of his left hand.
"More than a hundred witnesses," Newman said, "but not one of them saw anything."
"Nothin' freaky about that," Vanderwaal quipped. "Any cameras?"
"Dozens of them," Newman confirmed. "All functional."
"So?" Vanderwaal urged, "Tell me what happened!"
"That's where it gets a little weird," Newman said, as he shifted in his chair. "The armored car driver stops and gets out, along with his partner. They secure the area, then give the OK to the guy inside. Just as he pushes the back door open from the inside, everyone freezes."
"You mean," Vanderwaal clarified, "the three security guards?"
"I mean everyone!" Newman shrugged his shoulders as if to say, I told you it was gonna be weird.
"Guards, pedestrians, drivers, bank personnel -- the cameras even spotted birds dropping out of the sky, and two cats stopped dead in their tracks. Then everyone collapsed -- like they were zapped by some kind of ray gun or somthin'."
"You mean just around the truck." Vanderwaal was having a hard time wrapping his head around this.
"If you consider a ten-block radius to be just around the truck," Newman ventured. "People more than ten blocks out thought they heard a low rumbling sound coming from the direction of the bank, if that's any help."
"What happened then?" Vanderwaal was really spinning his pencil now.
"Four motorcycles with trailers weave through the stopped cars and bodies on the sidewalk up to the back of the truck," Newman explained. "They start hauling moneybags from the truck into over-sized saddlebags, then into the trailers. They even put a bag each on their handlebars before driving through the chaos until they turn off out of camera range."
"We're we able to track them on video?" Vanderwaal was now including himself as part of the effort.
"No," Newman said. "We scoured the street they turned off on, but it ties into too many places."
"In other words," Vanderwaal concluded, "they could have eased into traffic in any number of places in any kind of vehicle without being caught on camera again."
"That's the way it looks." Newman looked down as he spoke.
"Best guess?" Vanderwaal asked.
"These guys knew
where the cameras were," Newman postulated. "They prob'ly stuck a truck in some back alley and loaded the bikes and the money in the back."
"Any bills show up yet?" Vanderwaal looked hopeful.
"That's the thing" Newman said. "These weren't new bills. We don't even have a range to work with."
"Of course no ink packs." Vanderwaal mentally checked it off the list in his head.
"That's only after the bank gets them," Newman said.
"What about GPS?" Vanderwaal asked.
"Sure," Newman said, "on the armored truck. But we already know where that ended up."
"Anything else?"
"Yeah, this was weird. They found a ceramic conical speaker pointing straight up, wired to an amplifier, a converter, and a motorcycle battery," Newman said. "Oh yeah, and an iPhone."