The Mervinettes spent three months planning their greatest – and in The Pan’s view, dumbest – bank heist. Gradually and meticulously they pieced together the information required over the course of the days and weeks – even that which the old man had already provided (except when it was unobtainable anywhere else) because they didn’t trust him and, as Big Merv said, you can never be too careful. The other robberies stopped except for when the Mervinettes needed more information, or the cash with which to buy it. The Pan had been practising his driving alone, usually by baiting traffic cops, until Gerry the Work Experience Creature from Snurd had arrived a week previously to collect his wheels and his spare keys.
Now here he was, driving Big Merv’s midnight blue MK II into the heart of Grongolia’s capital city, which, with characteristic Grongolian lack of originality, was also called Grongolia.
“What in The Prophet’s name am I doing here?” he asked himself.
If he could have arranged to have been anywhere else, even being closely questioned by the Resistance, a process often involving pain, inflicted with surgical precision, by experts, he would have done. One hand on the wheel, he ran the gearstick hand through his hair.
“How did I get myself into this?”
“By being an idiot and not paying attention.” Oh no! He didn’t have the time or will for an argument with his Virtual Father right now.
“I know Dad, you don’t need to tell me. I’m wondering if I should have called the old gimmer’s bluff.” His voice tailed off as he remembered how the old man had been able to quote a private conversation between himself and the other three Mervinettes. He was probably listening.
“And as for you, you conniving old git. It’s bad enough you putting us up to this but you’d better not be tuning in right now. A little privacy if you please.”
The Bank of Grongolia was the most heavily guarded public building in the city. Grongolia was the army’s garrison town, home to the Grongolian High Leader and chock-full of Grongles. Non-Grongles were only allowed into the city with special passes, and were most definitely barred from the country’s national bank. Big Merv and his colleagues had got round this technicality by wearing dark glasses and realistic green rubber faces made by a contact in Ning Dang Po’s film studios. They were wearing Grongolian army uniforms and carrying replica weapons, also made by the film studio contact, Grongolian military hardware being unavailable to civilians, let alone non-Grongles. Their false IDs were constructed by an expert forger named Derek and well ... they were all tall enough to pass for small Grongles and built the right way; that is, extensively. Derek had also produced the prerequisite special NGLF (Non-Grongolian Life Form) pass to allow The Pan to gain entry into the city, so he had no need for a disguise other than the one he usually wore.
The bank was in a large square and The Pan dropped his bosses off on the dot of midday, as planned, and drove round the block. Big Merv, Frank and Harry were to go into the vaults under the pretence of opening their ‘own’ safety deposit box, or at least the box belonging to the Grongles on their fake IDs. Once in the vaults they were to open a different box with a stolen key which Big Merv had been given and which he had secreted in the heel of his shoe. They were to remove the contents and walk back out. There were to be no heroics and no other boxes were to be touched, this was a high-class bespoke job. If they succeeded, the heist would take three minutes, if they failed, they wouldn’t come out again.
From behind the protection of the MK II’s bullet-proof, tinted glass, The Pan watched the inhabitants of the city going about their business in the midday sun. It was hot and the heat reflected off the pavements made it doubly warm. His palms were clammy and he was sweating. He had a bad feeling about this job and felt more nervous today than he had ever previously felt before a robbery. This was the Bank of Grongolia, he kept telling himself. His nerves were natural and only to be expected, but despite the gang’s best efforts, it had been planned with the cooperation of too many outsiders for his liking. The old man hadn’t struck him as the type to grass, but these days you could never be sure and the preparations had required input from many ‘suppliers’ outside Big Merv’s routine sphere of influence and trust.
Then there was the actual heist. The Pan knew nobody could waltz into the Bank of Grongolia to carry out a major theft without inside help and he kept asking himself, with growing disquiet, who that inside contact would be. The bank didn’t employ non-Grongolian staff, so the informant would have to be a Grongle. As Grongolia was a police state, most of the proper criminals were part of the Government, working in information retrieval for the secret police. Surely any other criminals would be political. They would be working against the state, for a resistance movement, if there was one. The point was, no-one with a similar background to the Mervinettes, or at least, no-one on their side, would work in the state bank.
Members of the political underworld had no scruples and considered themselves above real, honourable bank robbers like the Mervinettes. They would see Big Merv and his gang as expendable scum. What better way to deflect attention away from recovering the loot than handing over K’Barth’s most wanted gang of robbers?
He was marginally reassured by the fact he had the thimble with him, although there were so many checkpoints that he had hidden it in his boot, tucked under his instep, in case he was asked to get out of the MK II and searched. That was another worry. He’d driven through all those checkpoints without being stopped. That was enough to make The Pan nervous, on its own. It wasn’t natural. There was the timing too; midday, high noon, the perfect time for a gunfight if you wanted to stage a theatrical showdown, pocket the loot and pretend nothing had gone missing. Too many omens and too much theatre. It had to be a trap. The only question was exactly when it was going to be sprung. He turned up the air conditioning.
The Grongles, for some strange reason best known to themselves, drove on the wrong side of the road, measured their distances in some archaic unit long since abandoned by everyone else, and had a different highway code to the rest of the world. The Pan had spent several days learning to convert distances from Grongolian to K’Barthan units of measure, and reading and re-reading their highway code from cover to cover.
However, he was still nervous and he felt out of place driving on a different side of the street. He hadn’t seen anyone behind them but he was sure they were being shadowed as soon as they entered the city. He realised that his paranoia about being followed had mushroomed since his encounters with the old man. Maybe it was nerves, or perhaps it was normal to tail foreigners in Grongolia – after all, they were driving a snurd from K’Barth which, though not unusual, was distinctive. K’Barthan snurds were considered the best available and the MK II was the type of snurd the flasher, higher-ranking officers in the Grongolian army might bring back from a tour of duty there. A class staff vehicle to suitably impress the Grongolian ladies.
“Not that there appear to be any,” said The Pan, to himself. His visual radar was always finely tuned but the Grongolian streets were depressingly devoid of any form of female distraction. He supposed they were all kept locked away somewhere. He wondered if that was why the Grongles were all so bad tempered and prone to violence.
The three minutes were up and he was turning back into the square. Big Merv, Frank and Harry, still disguised as Grongolian army officers, were waiting for him. No klaxons were sounding, no shots being fired, no notice being taken. Nothing had gone wrong. Something always went wrong. Usually the Mervinettes spilled out onto the street in a hail of bullets and wailing alarms and leapt dashingly into the snurd with Big Merv shouting ‘Drive!’ just as the Grongolian police arrived. It was all part and parcel of the glamour.
“The public loves a snurd chase,” Big Merv would say.
It wasn’t natural. Once they were safe inside, The Pan scrutinised his passengers carefully. Yes, they were definitely Big Merv, Harry and Frank. As the snurd left the suburbs of the city they pulled their rubber Grongle faces over their heads and relaxed but The Pan didn’t. This had been too easy. He smelt a rat. He checked behind him, there was still no visual evidence but his belief that they were being followed hadn’t abated.
They soon left the city behind as – choosing small, less-frequented roads – The Pan headed to the coast. He’d memorised the relevant sections of a Grongolian road atlas and now, as he drove, he could picture the map in his mind’s eye and imagine the MK II as a small red dot moving slowly across the page, towards the sea.
Every mile he put between himself and the Bank of Grongolia was a head start.
In The Pan’s view, that meant the closer they got to the coast, the more relaxed he should have been.
“Hmm, so why isn’t that happening?” he muttered. Instead of relaxing he was experiencing an unaccountable feeling of foreboding and it was getting worse, not better.
“What’s wrong?” growled Merv, next to him. “You’re mooning away like a great girl.”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t lie to me you moron. Talk, or shut it!”
“Nothing yet,” The Pan corrected himself, “I’m still thinking it through.”
“I ain’t comfortable with you doing any of that thinking malarkey unless you’re gonna share it with us, right boys?”
“Yeh,” said Frank and Harry in unison from the back.
“I appreciate that,” said The Pan.
“Then get a move on.”
No pressure then. Was this a hunch? It was certainly a strange sensation. Almost supernatural in that he couldn’t explain it properly. His spine tingled, the little hairs were standing up on the back of his neck and though the air in the snurd was warm enough, goose bumps were rising on his arms. As if he’d walked into somewhere very cold – like a meat safe.
He was experiencing the same sense of foreboding that comes of watching too many horror movies, late into the night. The feeling you get when that logical, sensible part of your brain, the bit which guides you in moments of abject fear, has been bypassed.
He scanned the horizon behind him. No, nothing unusual there.
In front? No, still nothing, but the feeling persisted. It was a long way from the city of Grongolia to the coast, a good six hours drive on the roads, and they were using the roads rather than flying, to keep a low profile. They were being watched, The Pan was sure, the Grongles were anticipating their every move and waiting for the best, most effective moment to trap them.
A premonition then? Possibly. The Pan wasn’t superstitious.
He racked his brains to try and think of anything he might have seen, anything, no matter how innocuous or tiny, which might help him make sense of the way he felt. No, he was doing this wrong. The why was academic, the most important question was how to react.
Easy. Stop trying to be intelligent about this. Stop trying to blend in; just panic, floor the accelerator and take off. Then again, what if there was nothing to fear? He would draw attention to the MK II for nothing, or worse, make both himself and the other Mervinettes look stupid. The Pan knew he would rather be alive and uncool than dead with cred, but he also knew he was at variance with all three of his colleagues in this respect.
On a number of occasions, Big Merv had made The Pan painfully – physically painfully – aware of the fact he didn’t like to look an idiot.
“Arnold’s snot!” He was going to have to say something.
“Done yer thinking then?” asked Big Merv acerbically.
“Yes and no. OK. Perhaps it’s my nerves but something isn’t right—” he began.
“What ain’t right?” demanded Big Merv impatiently.
“Nothing I can be sure of,” said The Pan, “that’s the trouble,” he took a deep breath, “but I know this is all wrong.”
“Why?”
“Not sure,” he shrugged, “but nothing fits.”
“You great mincing wuss,” snapped Frank in the back putting on a high-pitched voice. “Help me, help me, Big Merv! This is all wrong but I don’t know why! Nothing fits! Holy Arnold!” he exclaimed, reverting to type, “how can that make sense? Either something IS wrong and you know what and why, or it isn’t?” Frank was uncomplicated.
“It’s nothing concrete, it’s a gut feeling,” began The Pan.
“Aw, don’t listen to this namby-pamby nonsense boss,” said Harry.
“Shut it! All of you,” shouted Big Merv.
“No. I’m doing my best to explain here. If you won’t listen then fine! When we die it’s your fault.”
Big Merv turned sideways and leaned towards The Pan.
“No,” he corrected, “if we die, it’s your fault and if there is life after death, you can bet that wherever it is we go, I’ll find you and make you pay. Do you want to take that chance?”
The Pan coughed delicately.
“Nope. But if you’re entrusting your safety to me, shouldn’t you take my advice?” he replied, hoping Big Merv wouldn’t thump him.
“It depends what your advice is,” said Big Merv, “you’re not the only one who’s shaky about this job. We all knew it could be a set-up, eh boys?” He nodded at Frank and Harry in the back.
“Yeh,” they agreed in unison.
They had almost reached the ocean. There were two ways to cross it; the first was to go over it, in aviator mode, which Big Merv disliked intensely. The second, The Pan’s preferred method, was to go under it, in submersible mode, which Big Merv loathed and detested. The submersible mode was slow and uncomfortable, and if they were discovered, escape would be far more difficult, although, of course its lack of practicality meant that the Grongles were unlikely to consider it a viable escape option. If the Grongles had found out about the robbery, their eyes would turn to the skies, for who would travel under water at a few miles an hour when they could travel through the sky at a few hundred?
“We could travel all the way up the Dang without being noticed,” said The Pan as he expounded his theory to Big Merv. “We would drive up the bank in the Goojan Quarter. Nobody would see us.” As he got to the end of his argument they had reached the brow of a hill. Below them the ground fell away to the coast. It was low tide and mile upon mile of shining wet sand reflected the pink of the sunset sky. Driving across the sand would be idiotic – snurds were as susceptible to quicksand as anything else. He would have to fly to the water first and then submerge – Big Merv would never buy that; once they were up in the air, that would be that. He shrugged his shoulders.
“Mmm,” he said, “perhaps we’ll have to fly.”
“Yeh,” growled Frank from the back, “maybe we will.”
The Pan glanced at Big Merv and although expected, his nod of assent was still a disappointment.
“Fair enough.”
He revved the MK II and took off.