One hundred and nineteen

Forty men were toiling away in an underground warehouse behind the Club Souterrain.

Each of them was dressed in special overalls, without pockets, and was forbidden to wear anything underneath. The leader of the team was a dark, crow-faced man called Larbi. Having worked for the Falcon for almost a decade, he was one of the few men in a position of responsibility.

‘Those last bales of banknotes have to be counted again,’ he instructed.

‘But they’ve been counted once already,’ one of the men replied.

‘Twice. They must be counted twice. And that’s the order.’

Larbi jerked a thumb to the counting machines. The men started feeding the wads of notes through them a second time. There was a sense of anticipation and of fear, as though they were being watched.

And of course they were.

Mounted on the walls were at least a dozen surveillance cameras. Some of them had wide-angle lenses, while others focused close up on the hands operating the counting machines. The room had been specially designed by a team brought in from Corsica. It could be hermetically sealed and flooded within a matter of minutes, or pumped full of poison gas in the event of a raid.

At half-past ten, Larbi clapped his hands.

‘Hurry!’ he yelled, breaking over the noise of the counting machines. ‘And make sure the bundles are double-tied!’

He noted down the result of the first count in the red ledger. The rows of columns were tight with numbers, dates, and code-names.

At that moment, a mousy man in a beige polyester suit and cheap city shoes shuffled into the warehouse through an armoured door. He had a rough unwashed appearance, and was severely stressed.

‘He’s here,’ he said. ‘And he wants to know the total.’

Larbi gave a number, rounding it up.

‘Is that all?’

‘No, we’re still waiting for the Marrakech deposit. It should be here any minute.’

‘They are cutting it close.’ Pulling up his polyester cuff, the mousy man glanced at his watch. ‘He’s not going to be pleased.’

‘How’s the club tonight?’

‘Busy. There’s a cruise ship full of Russians docked at the port.’

Larbi wiped a hand down over his face.

‘We’ll be ready on time,’ he said.