The power outage triggered several alarms in the affected buildings. By 4:00 a.m., an electrical engineer had worked his way through the school’s computer grid and found the problem. Electricity was restored in all buildings except the library. The chief of security sent three officers to the library. It took them ten minutes to find the cause of the alarm.
By then, the gang had stopped at a cheap motel off Interstate 295 near Philadelphia. Trey parked the van beside an 18-wheeler and away from the lone camera monitoring the parking lot. Mark took a can of white spray paint and covered the “Princeton University Printing” on both of the van’s doors. In a room where he and Trey had stayed the night before, the men quickly changed into hunting outfits and crammed everything they’d worn for the job—jeans, sneakers, sweatshirts, black gloves—into another duffel. In the bathroom, Jerry noticed the small cut on his left wrist. He had kept a thumb on it during the ride and noted that there was more blood than he’d realized. He wiped it clean with a bath cloth and debated whether to mention it to the others. Not now, maybe later.
They quietly removed all their stuff from the room, turned off the lights, and left. Mark and Jerry got into a pickup truck—a fancy club cab leased and driven by Denny—and they followed Trey and the van out of the parking lot, onto the street, then back onto the interstate. They skirted the northern edge of the Philadelphia suburbs, and, using state highways, disappeared into the Pennsylvania countryside. Near Quakertown, they found the county road they had chosen and followed it for a mile until it turned to gravel. There were no houses in the area. Trey parked the van in a shallow ravine; removed the stolen license plates; poured a gallon of gasoline over their bags filled with tools, cell phones, radio equipment, and clothing; and lit a match. The fireball was instant, and as they drove away in the pickup they were confident they had destroyed all possible evidence. The manuscripts were safely tucked between Trey and Mark on the rear seat of the pickup.
As daylight slowly crept over the hills, they rode in silence, each of the four observing everything around them, which was very little. An occasional vehicle passing in the other direction, a farmer headed to his barn and not looking at the highway, an old woman collecting a cat off the front porch. Near Bethlehem, they merged onto Interstate 78 and headed west. Denny stayed well under the speed limit. They had not seen a police car since leaving the Princeton campus. They stopped at a drive-thru for chicken biscuits and coffee, then headed north on Interstate 81 toward the Scranton area.
8.
The first pair of FBI agents arrived at the Firestone Library just after 7:00 a.m. They were briefed by campus security and the Princeton city police. They took a look at the crime scene and suggested strongly that the library remain closed indefinitely. Investigators and technicians from the Trenton office were hurrying to the school.
The president of the university had just returned to his home on campus, after a very long night, when he got the news that some valuables were missing. He raced to the library, where he met with the chief librarian, the FBI, and the local police. Together, they made the decision to keep a lid on the story for as long as possible. The head of the FBI’s Rare Asset Recovery Unit in Washington was on the way, and it was his opinion that the thieves might contact the school quickly and want a deal. Publicity, and there would be an avalanche of it, would only complicate matters.
9.
The celebration was postponed until the four hunters arrived at the cabin, deep in the Poconos. Denny had leased the small A-frame for the hunting season, with funds that would be repaid when they cashed in, and had been living there for two months. Of the four, only Jerry had a permanent address. He’d been renting a small apartment with his girlfriend in Rochester, New York. Trey, as an escapee, had been living on the run most of his adult life. Mark lived part-time with an ex-wife near Baltimore, but there were no records to prove it.
All four had multiple forms of fake identification, including passports that would fool any customs agent.
Three bottles of cheap champagne were in the fridge. Denny opened one, emptied it into four mismatched coffee cups, and offered a hearty “Cheers, boys, and congratulations. We did it!” The three bottles were gone in half an hour and the weary hunters fell into long naps. The manuscripts, still in the identical archival storage boxes, were stacked like bricks of gold in a gun safe in a storage room, where they would be guarded by Denny and Trey for the next few days. Tomorrow, Jerry and Mark would drift back home, exhausted from a long week in the woods hunting deer.
10.
While Jerry slept, the full weight and fury of the federal government was moving rapidly against him. An FBI technician noticed a tiny spot on the first step of the stairway leading to and from the library’s vault. She thought, correctly, that it was a drop of blood and that it had not been there long enough to turn dark maroon, almost black. She gathered it, told her supervisor, and the sample was rushed to an FBI lab in Philadelphia. DNA testing was done immediately, and the results were rammed into the national data bank. In less than an hour, it tagged a match in Massachusetts: one Gerald A. Steengarden, a paroled felon convicted seven years earlier of stealing paintings from an art dealer in Boston. A squad of analysts worked feverishly to find any trace of Mr. Steengarden. There were at least five in the U.S. Four were quickly eliminated. Search warrants for the apartment, cell phone records, and credit card records of the fifth Mr. Steengarden were obtained. When Jerry woke up from his long nap deep in the Poconos, the FBI was already watching his apartment in Rochester. The decision was made not to go in with a warrant, but to watch and wait.
Maybe, just maybe, Mr. Steengarden would lead them to the others.
Back at Princeton, lists were being made of all students who had used the library in the past week. Their ID cards recorded each visit to any of the libraries on campus. The fake ones stood out because in college fake IDs were used for the underage purchase of alcohol, not to sneak into libraries. The exact times of their use were determined, then matched against video footage from the library’s surveillance cameras. By noon the FBI had clear images of Denny, Jerry, and Mark, though these would prove to be of little value at the moment. All were well disguised.
In Rare Books and Special Collections, old Ed Folk snapped into high gear for the first time in decades. Surrounded by FBI agents, he raced through the log-in registers and security photos of his recent visitors. Each one was called for verification, and when Adjunct Professor Neville Manchin at Portland State spoke to the FBI he assured them he had never been near the Princeton campus. The FBI had a clear photo of Mark, though they did not know his real name.
Less than twelve hours after the heist was successfully completed, forty FBI agents were grinding away, poring over videos and analyzing data.