The Eternity Project

4

LOWER EAST SIDE, MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY



‘If it’s going down, it’ll be within the next ten minutes.’

The car in which Detective Karina Thorne sat was parked by the sidewalk on the corner of Broadway and Pike, looking across the intersection toward a Pay-Go cash-checking store where a trickle of customers were filing in and out, many of them with envelopes in their hands.

Karina kept her hands in her lap, preventing herself from checking her sidearm for the twentieth time. Anxiety twisted her stomach muscles and her gaze flicked back and forth from the store to her wing mirrors, catching a glimpse of her long dark hair pinned back in a ponytail. Her features were a little too stern to be called attractive, the line of her mouth thin and her jaw a little too wide.

‘Relax,’ came a voice from beside her. ‘No need to get twitchy until something happens.’

Jake Donovan, a twenty-year veteran of the New York Police Department, glanced sideways at her with a wink and a smile. Donovan was in his mid-fifties but could still bench-press two-fifty for five and was surrounded by an aura of competence that commanded complete loyalty from his team. Karina let some of her tension out in a long sigh.

‘It’s a big deal if it goes down, is all,’ she replied.

‘They’re all a big deal,’ Donovan said, ‘especially when we catch them in the act.’

Karina nodded but did not share her boss’s confidence.

Over the past two months, several major bank heists had rocked the east coast from Pennsylvania right up to Maine. It was considered almost impossible to hit a major bank successfully these days: accounts at all American banks were insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, bringing such heists under federal jurisdiction and involving the FBI. Federal Sentencing Guidelines mandated long prison terms and there was no parole in the federal prison system. Coupled with biometric markers on bank cases – dye-emitting sensors that rendered stolen cash useless – the massive resources of law enforcement and the involvement of the media in pursuing and catching violent gangs ensured that few such criminal enterprises succeeded for long.

But the gang that had hit four armoured trucks in New Hampshire and Connecticut were a different breed. Wily, patient and yet supremely violent, their genius was a blend of deception and simplicity. They wore disguises, but not just clothes. Instead, they wore complex, expensive latex headpieces and gloves most often seen in movies, that completely altered their features and even their skin color. Using these skillfully crafted latex masks, no law-enforcement agency yet had been able to identify any of the gang members. All of the men were of similar height and build and conducted themselves in a manner that seemed to suggest a military background. But with the United States having been on a war footing for over a decade and with the heists occurring across several states, the number of disgruntled former infantrymen who could be suspects ran into the tens of thousands.


In short, it had been the perfect crime. No evidence. No leads.

Until now. An informant had tipped Donovan off a week previously that the gang was rumored to have moved even farther south, losing themselves in New York’s population with a plan to hit one of the countless cash-checking centers located all over the city. A further tip put the target as the Pay-Go on Broadway. It was a good target, sitting on a broad intersection with multiple egress routes across to New Jersey, up into Midtown and Harlem or out across the East River to Queens and Long Island. If the gang hit either the Pay-Go or the armoured truck due to make its daily collection and were able to give police the slip, then they would have multiple opportunities to transfer vehicles, split up on foot or just hunker down somewhere and wait for the dust to settle.

A car pulled in ahead of them, a dark blue Prius with three occupants: one woman, one man and a young girl in a child seat. The man got out and kissed both the woman and the child goodbye. The Prius pulled away and the man walked to Karina’s car, opened the rear door and climbed in.

‘We need more units,’ he said as he closed the door.

Tom Ross was a young but dedicated service officer who had joined the department in his late teens and was now Karina’s partner. A firearms and forensics officer, he’d made detective by his twenty-sixth birthday, an extraordinary achievement by any standards. In the rear seat alongside Tom sat Glen Ryan, Karina’s boyfriend of the past five years. Glen was a former soldier who had joined the NYPD two years previously, all buzz-cut hair and square-jawed efficiency. It was like dating the Terminator, minus the sense of humor. Iraq and Afghanistan had drained Glen of his zest for life and he viewed most of humanity with a disappointed disdain.

‘We haven’t got the resources,’ Donovan replied to Tom, ‘not with the presidential debates going on.’

The city was host to the incumbent president and his challenger’s first live television debate in the run-up to the elections, and half of the goddamned force was on high alert at the Hofstra University on Long Island. The fact that the most wanted gang of thieves on the east coast had possibly chosen today to hit a target in Manhattan, during a period of reduced police activity and after a massive reduction in law-enforcement manpower, wasn’t hard to understand.

‘And it’s based on a tip-off and a hunch,’ Glen added, ‘not exactly rock-solid grounds for deploying the entire department, Tom.’

Tom Ross shrugged and checked his firearm. ‘These aren’t Boy Scouts we’re up against. Five cops against four psychopathic thieves isn’t my kind of odds.’

‘You should’ve seen Basra,’ Glen began, ‘you’d have—’

‘All right, Glen,’ Donovan cut him off, ‘we’ve heard it all before.’ The old man looked across at Karina. ‘Is Neville in position?’

Karina keyed a microphone concealed low under the dashboard. ‘You ready, Nev?’

The voice of Neville Jackson, an African-American cop and the team’s fifth member, came back over the radio loud and clear. ‘I’m on Grand. If they run north, I’ll pick them up.’

Karina scanned the Pay-Go one more time, and then Glen tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Here comes the armoured truck.’

Karina resisted the urge to glance over her shoulder at the traffic flowing down Broadway, instead looking down at her wing mirror to see a brief glimpse of a dark blue Freightliner easing its way toward the intersection.

‘We got any lookers?’ Karina asked.

All three men shook their heads. Nobody had been seen acting suspiciously, no lingerers on the intersection watching the Pay-Go. Karina searched for parked vehicles or motorcycles running up as the cash truck approached, but nothing untoward was happening.

‘Maybe they got wise to us and took off , ’ Tom hazarded.

It was possible, Karina reflected. A gang as methodical and experienced as the one they sought might have found a way to discreetly observe the Pay-Go and noticed the unremarkable gray sedan parked a hundred yards up from the intersection. At the least, they would have monitored the Pay-Go’s daily pickups. Most all armoured cash vehicles these days ran varying routes to avoid having regular daily collection times, all of which helped to confuse potential heists, but, with Pay-Go stores, there had to be at least one daily collection to avoid the vaults overfilling. A patient gang would wait for the right moment to strike.

‘That’s a big truck,’ Tom said.

The Freightliner pulled into the sidewalk alongside the Pay-Go and one of the armed personnel aboard climbed out, methodically locking the door behind him as the driver waited with the vehicle.

‘What’s the truck’s position on the round?’ Glen asked.

‘Fourteenth pickup,’ Donovan replied without hesitation. ‘Average pickup is worth about a quarter million bucks.’

‘Three and a half million,’ Karina said. ‘Well worth hitting, if you’ve got a plan.’

‘They’ll have to hurry up,’ Glen said. ‘Courier will be out of the store real quick, and, once he’s back aboard, there’s no way they can reach the cash.’

Armoured trucks were notoriously tough, and the drivers never had access to the money inside. They simply transferred the aluminum bank-cases into the vehicle. The cases were later retrieved at a secure depot.

Karina watched as the door to the Pay-Go opened and the armed man walked back out with a steel-gray cash box handcuffed to his left wrist. He strode into the cold, bright sunshine, toward the Freightliner’s side door, as the driver leaned forward to press a button to unlock the external cash-box door.

Karina knew the drill. The door would unlock. The guard would open it and insert the case into a locking mechanism, half in and half out of the vehicle. Secured, he would then uncuff himself and push the steel case fully inside, before shutting the door and climbing aboard.

There was no access to the cash from the vehicle cab.

There were no other access doors, no other way to get inside.

‘It’s not going down,’ Tom said. ‘He’s already at the door.’

Karina saw the guard disappear from sight as he reached the armoured truck, but she could see his reflection in the windows of the Pay-Go as he reached out for the door and slid it back to reveal a steel cage. He reached down, lifted the case and inserted it into the dock.

‘It’s off , ’ Glen agreed. ‘They can’t hit them now.’

Karina was about to reply when a screaming engine howled past them down Broadway. She turned her head as a huge, battered old Kenworth truck thundered through the traffic and across the intersection, black smoke pouring from its exhaust stacks.

Karina’s jaw dropped in disbelief as she realized what was about to happen.

‘They’re not hitting the store!’ she yelled. ‘They’re hitting the truck!’

‘Get out of the car!’ Donovan bellowed. ‘It’s on!’

In a moment of time frozen in Karina’s mind, the Kenworth roared through a red light across the intersection and, with a deafening crash of rending metal and shattering glass, it crashed into the parked armoured truck like a missile through an eggshell.