It had been a hot, sultry day for late September. From dawn, the sun had steadily baked the dry, still air and the heat hung over the city in a haze like a blanket, suffocating the energy out of every living thing.
By late afternoon, Mary Lee Kramer had started to think about what she would buy at the grocery store on the way home. She had joined the bank as a trainee teller two weeks after she graduated from High School. In the thirty years since then, she had married, had two children and was now Head of Personal Loans at the branch just ten minutes’ drive from her house.
She shuddered, a premonition she would say later. She felt cold, perhaps the sun was losing some of its heat. Walking to the thermostat on the wall of her office, she turned the air conditioning down a couple of degrees. As she returned to her seat, she glanced at the silver carriage clock on her desktop, a present from the bank for twenty-five years’ service. 4.10pm, twenty minutes until the bank closed its doors for the day.
The van that pulled up at the kerb outside her window looked like all the others owned by Georgia Power and Light. The men who got out of it were wearing grey overalls with the red and white company logo across their backs and name badges on their chests. It seemed odd, she thought to herself vacantly, that there were so many of them. Three men got out of the cab and three more exited from the sliding side door. She watched them for a few minutes.
The first man out of the cab walked to a manhole and lifted the cover with a pair of long metal handles. He slid up to his shoulders into the hole with practised ease and started work on the spaghetti plate of coloured wires in front of him. A second man, wearing a yellow webbing tool belt, knelt beside the manhole and passed tools, like a theatre nurse. The other men stood around, not looking at the man working on the wiring, but up and down the street and at the roofs of the neighbouring buildings. Their movements were fast and nervous, as if they were on edge, unlike the laid-back, unhurried ways of most local workmen on a hot day, as slow and languid as the way they spoke, drawing out their words in the soft Georgia drawl. Mary Lee shrugged. Perhaps it was the end of their working day and they were anxious to get home and out of the heat. She went back to her paperwork.
Five minutes later, she looked up to see the workmen moving quickly in a group towards the doors of the bank. Three of them were carrying holdalls and they were all looking down at the ground, keeping their faces away from the CCTV camera. Some sixth sense told her something was wrong and she stood up as they came through the doors. She could see them clearly through the glass walls of her office which faced the banking hall.
As they came through the doors, they all pulled on ski masks and latex gloves. The men carrying the holdalls passed machine pistols to the others. Mary Lee’s husband Barney had served in the National Guard, she had watched some of his parades and recognized that there was something military in the way they fanned out to cover the bank with their machine pistols. One man went along the row of front windows, pulling down the blinds and another hung a sign on the front door. She could just read it: ‘Due to an electrical fault this branch of the bank is now closed. We will reopen at 9 am tomorrow morning. We are sorry for the inconvenience.’ He pressed a small piece of blu tack on to the door, which was attached to the cord that held the sign. Then he closed both doors and drew the bolts, locking them.
Mary Lee sat back down and, reaching under her desk, pressed the button that sent a silent alarm to the local police station. She looked at the small amber light that told her that the alarm had activated. It remained unlit. Very slowly she reached for the phone and picked up the receiver. The line was dead.
In the banking hall, five of the six men were now standing in a line facing the long counter that divided the room. The other man, who was giving quiet orders and must be the leader, took a large black automatic handgun from inside his overalls. Attached to the barrel was the long cylinder of a silencer.
A door at the far side of the room opened and Stan Kerowski strolled in. Stan was the uniformed security guard, but he was more for show than security. He wore dark blue trousers with a red stripe down the sides, highly polished boots, a white shirt with blue epaulettes and a belt holding a truncheon and a revolver. But Stan was 68 years old, badly overweight and his eyesight was failing. He stopped, trying to make sense of the scene in front of him. The robber nearest to him pointed his machine pistol at him and motioned for him to put his hands in the air. Stan didn’t argue. The man walked towards him and, placing the barrel of a gun under the guard’s chin, undid Stan’s belt and threw it towards the door. Then he took a half step backwards and hit Stan hard across the side of his head with the butt of the machine pistol. With a hollow gurgling sound coming from his throat, Stan collapsed to the ground and lay motionless, a steady trickle of blood running from his right temple and staining the carpet under his head.
As Mary Lee watched in horror, the leader looked at the glass-fronted offices and saw her. He motioned at her with his gun to come out of the office and join the small group of customers and staff standing by the end of the counter.
The counter ran across nearly the width of the building. It was a solid, dark mahogany structure with bullet-proof glass screens fitted to its top and running up to the ceiling. Behind it were the tellers’ stations and on a busy day they would all be fully manned. Today only five tellers stared at the robbers from behind the glass, safe that they could not be shot, but knowing that they were trapped like fish in a barrel. When the bank was constructed, for the sake of security, they had only built one door; the robbers were between the tellers and the door.
The building was about 25 years old and the exterior, all angled concrete and smoked glass windows, once the cutting edge of architectural design, now looked old and jaded. It was built on a lot between a car showroom and a seafood restaurant. The lot had been occupied by a local supermarket which was slowly squeezed by the national chains that had moved into South Atlanta 35 years ago. It had finally given up the fight and gone into receivership. The bank had bought the lot, demolished the supermarket and constructed an impressive new building. Now, from the outside, the only imposing feature were the double doors, twelve feet high, sprayed to look like bronze and, like all the branches of the Atlanta Second National Bank, a copy of the ones at the main branch on Martin Luther King Boulevard, embossed with scenes of industrial life.
The interior of the bank had been renovated five years ago. A new thick pile oatmeal carpet had been laid, the walls had been painted deep red with a Greek key frieze picked out in gold and white running round the room five feet below the ceiling. Across the length of the right-hand wall were four glass-fronted offices for the middle management and, at the back of the building, the staff restrooms and kitchen, the manager’s office, the safety deposit and vault.
The leader of the men who had disrupted the bank’s day stepped towards the group in front of the mahogany counter.
‘I want one of you,’ he said in faultless English, ‘to open the vault. Who will do that?’
Some of the group simply shook their heads, others looked down at the floor. Nobody wanted to be picked out.
The man took another two steps forward and took hold of Hal Clarke’s sleeve. Hal was about 35 years old, married to Belinda, a schoolteacher, with two young children. He was the Assistant Manager and occupied the office next to Mary Lee’s. He was the closest friend she had at the bank and he and Belinda came round for dinner about once a month. Hal was easy-going, with a ready smile and a dry sense of humour. He organized the staff Christmas party and summer picnic at Piedmont Park every year. He was an Atlanta boy born and bred and a lifelong, fanatical fan of the Falcons and the Braves. He looked nervous as the man pulled him forward, separating him from the group.
‘I want you,’ said the man, putting the barrel of the gun to Hal’s forehead, ‘to open the vault.’
Hal’s smile was nervous, not his usual, almost childlike, broad, open-faced grin.
‘The vault is locked,’ he said softly, ‘I can’t override it.’
From behind the ski mask, the man smiled back at him. Then he pulled the trigger. There was a soft pop and Hal fell backwards, hitting the floor hard and, still smiling, looking blankly up at the ceiling, the small circular hole in the middle of his forehead filling with blood. Three of the women in the group screamed.
‘I don’t have time to piss around with you people!’ the man shouted, ‘I am going to kill one of this group,’ he pointed at the people cowering in front of him, ‘every thirty seconds until someone tells me he can open the vault.’
There was silence, the tension in the room increasing as the seconds passed.
‘I can open the vault,’ said a voice from the back of the room, behind the tellers’ counter.
Everyone turned to look at the branch manager, Robert Santini, who was standing by the door of his office.
‘I know you will, Mr Santini,’ said the man calmly. Then he raised his voice again.
‘Do you want to know how I know this man’s name!’ he shouted. ‘Do you people think we just walked in here! We have been asking questions about this bank for months!’
His voice dropped forty decibels.
‘Your manager will have spent the last five minutes trying to contact anybody outside this building. He will have failed. The telephone lines are cut, your alarm system is disarmed, we have blocked all emails and disabled the local mobile phone transmitter. He can’t even bang on the window of his office, it doesn’t have a window. You are cut off from the world and we are totally in control. You will do exactly as I say, or you will all die within the next ten minutes. Does anyone disagree with me?’
There were no takers. By now just about everybody was looking at the floor.
‘Open the gate,’ said the man with a handgun, pointing to a tall steel security gate at the end of the counter. The nearest teller stepped forward with the urgency of wanting to please and opened it. The men with the machine pistols herded the group from the front of the counter through the gate, so that now nobody living, except Stan Kerowski, his chest hardly moving as his breath came in short rasping gasps, was left on the customers’ side of the counter.
Two of the robbers went down the line of tills, emptying the money into canvas sacks and, at each till drawer, ignoring the marked notes that were put there by the bank to be easily traced.
With gentle prodding from the machine pistols, the 28 customers and staff were moved towards the vault. The leader stood beside Robert Santini and looked at his watch.
‘You have three minutes to open the vault, Robert,’ he said, ‘then I will start shooting people.’
Santini faced the vault and took a deep breath to steady himself. In front of him was a large circular steel door, 8 feet in diameter. It was closed by an electronic locking system that opened automatically each morning from eight to nine to allow money to be taken out and, again, between five and six in the evening.
‘If you wait thirty minutes or so, it will open and electronically,’ he said.
‘We are on a tight schedule, we don’t have time to hang around waiting for the police to arrive. Open it.’
From his pocket, Robert Santini took a bunch of keys and inserted three of them into locks in the rim of the steel door. He turned each of them once, then repeated the sequence. A small hatch opened, revealing a 16 digit punchboard, topped by a red light. Santini punched in ten numbers, but the light stayed on.
The man gently laid the barrel of his handgun on Robert Santini’s shoulder.
‘If you tell me you can’t open it, you won’t see the others die, you will be first.’
‘No, no,’ said Santini, nervously wiping his hands on his thighs, ‘I just rushed it a bit, that’s all. I got the numbers in the wrong order.’
‘Try again,’ said the man, leaving the gun where it was, ‘and get it right this time.’
Robert Santini concentrated and took his time punching in the numbers. At the tenth go, there was a short series of sharp clicks he recognized as the locking bars disengaging and the red light went out. He turned the wheel in the centre of the door and it swung open silently on giant, precision engineered hinges, as fluorescent lights in the interior blinked on.
The man showed no emotion. He nodded to the door beside the vault that led to the safety deposit box room.
‘Open that,’ he said.
‘I have only one key, the box holders have the others. You need two keys to open the door.’
‘Don’t play games with me, Robert, you can open it. Do it in ten seconds or I’ll blow it open just after I kill you.’
His hands shaking slightly, Santini used two more keys in the bunch to open the door.
One of the men in the overalls went into the vault, piling stacks of notes into a holdall. Two more went into the safety deposit box room. One of them took a drill from a holdall and began moving down the rows of boxes, drilling out each lock. The other man followed him, pulling out the boxes and emptying them onto the floor, taking only money and anything gold.
When all three men came back out, carrying heavy bags, the leader tapped Robert Santini on the shoulder with a gun.
‘Into the vault,’ he said.
Santini looked at him quizzically. The man turned to the group standing behind Santini.
‘All of you,’ he said.
‘But there’s not enough room,’ protested Santini.
‘Just get in.’
‘It’s airtight, if that door is closed, unless it is opened within an hour, we’ll suffocate.’
‘I’ll give you two pieces of advice. Don’t panic, breathe slowly, the air will last longer. And pray.’
The staff and customers all crowded together inside the vault as the door was closed and the lights went out. They stood in silence for two or three minutes.
‘I can hear air conditioning,’ someone said, ‘we’ll be okay.’
‘The A.C. just re-circulates the same air,’ said Santini, ‘it’s cool, but there will still be less and less oxygen each time it circulates.’
Putting his handgun back into his overalls, the man stepped forward and took a small lump of plastic explosive from a pouch in one of the holdalls. He pressed it into the punchboard. One of the others handed him two wires and a battery. He pushed one end of the wires into the explosive and attached the other ends to the battery terminals. With a dull thud the punchboard and its electronics blew apart.
‘Now they will spend the next few hours trying to save those people and by the time they turn their attention to us, the trail will be very cold.’
The group took off their ski masks. One man opened the front door just wide enough to get through it, and walked quickly to the van. He slid open the side door, jumped into the cab and started the engine. The leader looked at his watch again: the timing was just right. 4.30 pm, the customers would expect the bank to be closed now. The machine pistols were crammed into the holdalls and he left with the three men carrying them, all climbing straight into the van through the sliding door. The last man came through the bank doors, taking the sign down as he did so. But he pulled too hard on the cord and the blu tack holding it shot off and bounced twice on the pavement before landing ten yards away, somewhere in the gutter. The man looked for it, trying to decide if he should go to find it and pick it up.
‘Move!’ hissed the leader from the open door of van. He wasn’t in the mood for delay.
The man shut the doors of the bank, walked to the cab of the van and got in. The driver engaged first gear and set off at a steady, lawful speed. If he ever finds out, thought the passenger, I’m dead. He didn’t tell anyone that he had pressed the blu tack onto the door before he put on his latex gloves. It had the imprint of his right thumb on it.