Henderson's Boys: Eagle Day (4 page)

New York City, USA

He was named Philippe Tomas Bivott after his French grandfather, but everyone called him PT. He was the middle child in a family of three boys; both his parents were French, but he’d lived in America all his life. PT’s mother died when he was ten and his father Miles moved to New York, for a job in the docks fixed up by his late wife’s brother. It was secure work with medical insurance and union pay, but Miles Bivott had no taste for honest labour. He quit after seven weeks, reverting to old habits and less honest ways of earning a crust.

It was a couple of weeks before Christmas and a moderate snowfall had turned to grey slush on New York’s pavements. Patches of ice lay beneath and you’d wind up bruised if you put your shoe in the wrong place, but these were the least of PT’s problems.

It was three a.m. and PT needed a drill bit, specifically one six inches long and three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter. The thirteen year old walked close to the buildings, doing his best to be invisible. He was wrapped warm in black boots and sheepskin-lined gloves. A knitted hat came down over his ears and tied around his chin, and a scarf covered everything that was left, apart from a tiny slit through which you could see the bridge of a nose and dark brown eyes.

He looked both ways before cutting across the deserted alleyway. His only company was a flurry of snowflakes and empty metal cans thrown down by the garbage men a couple of hours earlier. Up ahead was a door and the sign above it said
A
&H Hardware
. Being three a.m. it was closed, along with every other hardware store in Manhattan.

PT took a torch out of his heavy coat and the light showed everything he’d hoped not to find: grilles over the windows, a deadlock and two bars across the door and a burglar alarm box on the wall above it. The padlocks holding the window grilles in place were the only chink in the armour: they were the kind of locks that looked fancy, but which had nothing more than a simple lever inside.

The owner of a hardware store should have known better. After a rummage in his trousers for a metal ring fitted with various files and picks, taking the padlocks off was only a matter of insert, jiggle and twist. The window grille lifted off with a shudder and PT almost lost his footing on the ice as he lowered its weight down to the pavement.

PT knew various ways to fool alarms, but you needed to scout the location in advance and he had to be in and out fast, which left smash-and-grab as his only option. He picked up one of the empty trash cans and took a run at the glass.

Shards tumbled out of the pane above PT’s head. He’d half hoped that the alarm would be deactivated or a phoney, but it broke into song as the metal can hit the floor inside the store. If there was a cop car nearby they’d have PT nailed in seconds and he rated his chances of capture at a hundred per cent if he hung around any more than four minutes.

It was an upscale area a quarter mile from Wall Street and the financial district, so the displays mounted along the wall on sheets of drilled hardboard were fancier than you’d expect: swanky bath taps, enamel light switches and brass door plates. After flicking on the lights PT stepped behind the counter and got a nose full of hardware: sawdust, key cutting and paint.

Racks of metal shelves stretched up to the ceiling, crammed with packets and tiny boxes: screws, brackets, light bulbs, a hundred different kinds of batteries and expensive top-shelf items, fronded with years of dust. The only way to know where everything was would be to work here for a couple of decades.

‘Come on you devils,’ PT said desperately as he looked around for the drills. ‘Where the hell are you?’

He grew more desperate as he walked between the shelves. A horrible feeling, like kittens turning somersaults in his tummy and no saliva in his mouth. Something sounded like a police siren, but the alarm was so loud he thought his mind must be playing tricks.

His elbow caught on a box of wood screws. They rolled off in a thousand directions as he moved on to a stepladder and scanned the aisles from up high.

‘Jackpot!’

Right up the front where he should have already looked, PT eyed a couple of hand drills hooked on to the shelf uprights and drill bits behind. He was there in a millisecond. Small drill bits were in drawers, the longer ones came in brown card boxes, wrapped in tissue paper – but hundreds of boxes were stacked up, with no order to them.

He read the packaging and threw them down at his feet. Eighth of an inch, one-quarter, five-sixteenths, one-sixteenth. His salt-crusted boots were encircled by boxes when he eyed a pair of three-sixteenths sitting right next to each other.

PT pocketed the two bits and slid a glove back over his hand as a flash of blue light burst across the street: cop car.

He thought about charging back through the busted window and making a run for it. He fancied his chances of outrunning the cops but not their cars or the bullets in their guns, so he gambled on a little door at the back of the shelves and prayed for a rear exit.

There was a draining board stacked with mugs and a desk covered in ledgers and hardware catalogues. The only door had a bar across, but a small window swung open easily enough and PT straddled his way into a paved yard as a cop yelled something like over the rattling alarm.
Come out with your hands up

Buildings backed on to all four sides of the courtyard. PT’s only hope was a gated alleyway at one end. The lead cop was already coming through the window and if the gate was locked he’d be looking at another three months in juvenile hall. But the catch lifted, the gate squealed and PT swept out on to the icy street.

It was a broad avenue, with shops, offices and steam rising from vents in the tarmac. PT only had twenty seconds over the cops, but he made the most of them, cutting bravely in front of a delivery truck and ending up across the street on a corner in front of Bert’s Joint, a twenty-four-hour diner frequented by cab drivers and printers from the newspaper building on the opposite corner.

After cutting down a side street, PT peeked back. The absence of chasing cops was a pleasant surprise, but the escape through the courtyard had disorientated him. Whilst he couldn’t be more than a kilometre from where he wanted to be, PT couldn’t tell what street he was on or what direction he needed to take to get back. What’s more, you didn’t see many thirteen year olds on the street at this time of the morning and he’d stick out a mile if a cop car cruised by.

PT jogged to the end of the alleyway, losing his footing as he reached the next street. He skidded into a mound of snow in the gutter, but the only harm was a soggy trouser leg, and as he stood up he saw the familiar red neon glow of the sign over , two blocks down. He looked back, reassuring himself that the cops weren’t following, before striding the two blocks.
Unicorn Tire Repair & Parking

The Unicorn was a multi-storey parking lot used by Wall Street types: bankers and stockbrokers. On a weekday it brimmed with Packards and Cadillacs and the chauffeurs who drove them spent whole days smoking and playing cards in a ground-floor lounge behind the tyre shop. But when the gates were locked at midnight the lights went out and you could hear your shoes echo down the gloomy concrete ramps.

Even after three months working in the basement every night and all day Sundays, the Unicorn lot still gave PT a creepy feeling. There were two ramps the width of a single car – one up one down – a booth where you paid to park and a sign resting on the wall that was put out when the lot filled up. PT opened a door-sized gate-within-a-gate and the instant he was through the head of his seven-year-old brother, Jeannot, popped over the brim of the down ramp.

‘Took you long enough,’ the boy sneered. ‘Did you get the bits?’

‘Like to see you try doing it quicker, you stick of piss,’ PT said, rattling the two boxed drill bits under Jeannot’s nose and expressing the special contempt he reserved for his little brother. ‘You cried your eyes out when the cops picked you up for stealing newspapers.’

Jeannot snapped back as the boys jogged down the vehicle ramp to the basement. ‘That was decades ago. You think I’d crack now? Anyway, you cried like a girl when we visited you in juvie.’

‘What do you know?’ PT scoffed. ‘I was one of the littlest guys there. You’d shit your little dungarees if the tough guys in juvie so much as eyeballed you.’

At the bottom of the unlit ramp there was a small access door with a water hose running out. It was flung open by PT’s seventeen-year-old brother, Leon. He was drowning in his own sweat and his muscular torso was streaked with clay.

‘Get ’em, bro?’ Leon asked.

PT waved the drill bits. ‘Close thing with the cops, but I lost ’em before I got back here.’

‘You sure?’

‘Hundred per cent.’ PT nodded.

‘OK, get on the trolley and take ’em down to Dad.’

Jeannot and PT ducked under their brother’s arm into a narrow room used for storage. There were buckets and cleaning chemicals on the shelves and a rail at one end on which hung jackets and caps worn by the Unicorn attendants. More unusually, linoleum floor tiles had been lifted up and there was a half-metre-wide hole in the floor at the opposite end. A rubber hose ran out of the hole, attached to a hand pump.

‘How’s the water level?’ PT asked, as he ripped off his gloves and coat and yanked muddy blue overalls over his street clothes.

‘Not great,’ Leon answered. ‘I’ve been pumping solid for the last hour and there’s still a good inch and a half of water in the middle of the tunnel.’

‘Should do us for tonight, and that’s all we need,’ PT said, as he sat over the edge of the hole and dropped down a metre and a half, clay spattering under his boots as he landed. The main shaft of the tunnel was less than half a metre wide. The ceiling was held up with heavy gauge mesh and metal hoops, while crude wooden rails ran along the floor.

PT lay chest down on a wooden trolley, head and feet hanging off opposite ends. He checked that all four wheels were aligned to the rails and rolled his head into the start of the tunnel. After reaching blindly at the ceiling he flicked a length of wire, ringing a bell directly above his head and another at the opposite end of the tunnel.

It was possible to pull the cart through the tunnel using the walls and floor as leverage, but once someone was stationed at each end it was faster to signal with the bell and have someone pull you through on a rope.

The trolley jerked suddenly – it would disappear from under you if you got your balance wrong – and began trundling through the blackness. Water always seeped through the clay, but the snow melt made it worse than usual and drips pelted PT’s neck as he rattled along with the rails centimetres in front of his face. It was pitch dark, but he’d been through hundreds of times and he knew every dip and twist, even down to the rattling noises made by the joins between individual pieces of rail.

The tunnel spanned thirty-eight metres, beneath the barbershop and beauty parlour next to Unicorn Tyre and Parking. Just beyond mid-point the clattering of the wheels changed to a rushing sound. The water was deep enough to plough over the front of the fast moving cart and give PT’s chest a soaking. After a slight kink to the left, he was able to look into electric light and see his father’s trousers and dirty arms pulling the rope hand over hand.

PT arrived into an underground chamber nearly two metres high and his father, Miles, reached out to stop the cart running into the mud wall.

They were directly beneath the New York branch of the Federal Reserve Exchange. The tunnel had been dug at a steady sixty centimetres per day for sixty days, and it had taken a further three weeks digging out the chamber and perfecting the running of the railway.

PT stood up, his face spattered with clay and dripping brown water that soaked him from his chest down to his thighs.

‘Looking wet, son!’ Miles Bivott said. ‘You get the drill bit?’

‘Two,’ PT said. ‘In case we break another.’

‘Good man. Any bother?’

‘A and H was alarmed. Cops went in the front but I made it out the back. I’m more worried about the water level in that tunnel.’

‘It’s been there near a hundred days,’ Miles said reassuringly. ‘We only need it for another hour or two.’

PT looked at the hole in the ceiling. This final break into the basement floor of the Federal Reserve Exchange vaults was critical: they could take their time building the tunnel, but once they broke through the floor they only had a few hours until the whole enterprise was uncovered by the morning security patrol.

‘Let’s get up there,’ Miles said. ‘Don’t want fingerprints, so get your gloves on.’

There was a ladder, but PT was light enough for his father to give him a boost. PT placed his hands flat against thick marble tiles and hauled his body into the brightly lit basement.

After the tunnel it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. Apart from the hole in the floor and his father’s muddy boot prints, PT found an orderly, wood-panelled space the size of two cars parked abreast. A staircase wound its way around a doorless cargo lift. At the opposite end of the room were huge metal doors, labelled and
cage 1
cage 2
. They weren’t cages at all, but basement vaults protected top, bottom and sides with thirty centimetres of battleship-grade armour plate.

The Federal Reserve supplied all currency in the United States and the cages existed because paper money wears out every few months and needs to be exchanged. When money gets tatty, banks send it to the Federal Reserve, who swap it for new bills.

If Miles Bivott’s information was correct, cage one contained several million dollars in crisp new bills. More importantly, cage two contained a similar amount of dilapidated bills, which would be impossible to track down through serial numbers.

Every Monday the money in cage two was taken out and spoiled with pink dye before being driven upstate to an incineration plant. But right now it was Sunday night and the cage might contain anything up to six million dollars.