3:37 P.M.
One hundred miles from Portland’s Fairview Mall, a tractor-trailer is traveling west on Interstate 84. The eighteen-wheeler is plain, white, and unmarked. Anonymous.
It’s safer that way. Safer for the three armed guards sitting on the truck’s bench seat. Safer for the trailer’s contents, which are rows of black buckets, filled with metal bars. Each metal bar is about the size of an ice-cube tray.
Some of the buckets hold silver bars. And some hold gold.
A single bucket of gold weighs eighty-six pounds and is worth $1.6 million.
Karl McKinley has been thinking about those buckets for years.
Once a month, this tractor-trailer makes the trip from Martin’s Metals in Boise, Idaho, to a processing plant in Vancouver, Washington. The plant serves jewelry makers from Portland to Seattle.
A few days before it left, Karl paid a worker at Martin’s Metals to add a couple of extra features to the eighteen-wheeler. Features the guards know nothing about.
The first is a GPS tracker stuck to the underside of the chassis with a magnet. The tracker means that Karl can follow the tractor-trailer virtually, without arousing the suspicion of the guards.
The second addition has been placed under the dash, in the footwell. It’s a device normally used to deter burglars in million-dollar homes. When triggered by remote control, it will fill the truck’s cab with pepper spray.