Peter took their guns from them and went to the door.
With some difficulty, Morgan managed to get Grace aside, away from Peter, and when he had her attention he pointed to the Irishman, and said shrewdly: "He's not Mr. Shahari. Neither is the little fat one. Shouldn't we tell Peter?"
"I believe he knows," Grace said with a gentle smile. "But there's something else you might do for him."
"Oh, I'd do anything for Peter."
Peter was looking at his watch. "All right, chums, let's get with it."
The Irishman stopped in the doorway and looked back enviously at Blake and Tonelli. "Peter, you're a selfish bastard. Wouldn't you even wait one minute for an old pal?"
"Come on," Peter said sharply.
For the church bells were already sounding five, and a dangerous dawn was spreading slowly down from the hills to cover the old town with a light the colour of pearls.
But it was not yet too late…
CHAPTER TWELVE
Grace's voice sounded suddenly in his ear, a tense, metallic whisper.
"Get ready, Peter. They're opening the gate. The bulls are running."
Peter gripped the handle of the plunger, and looked at Bendell and the Irishman. "Here we go, lads."
"Now, Peter! Now."
Peter rammed the plunger home, and two explosions shook the air, their echoes blending and converging instantly in one great blast; the first roared over their heads like long freight trains rumbling towards the sky, while the second, compact and contained, sounded deep within the shaft they were driving through the wall to the bank. A jet of smoke and dust shot into the basement. Splinters of rock whistled and whined about their ears.
The Irishman and Bendell, carrying short pickaxes, ran through the eddying layers of smoke, and disappeared into the mouth of the tunnel.
Francois and Peter followed with a tool kit and valises. Another explosion sounded above the city, as the bulls began their last race through the barricaded streets. In the narrow shaft, they could hear the muffled sound of their hooves, the distant roaring of the crowds.
The Irishman's pick rang against crumbling brick and stone.
"Pay dirt, lad," he called back to Peter.
They pulled aside the last bricks with their hands, chopped through la things and plaster, and crawled, one by one, into the dark basement of the bank. Peter stood perfectly still, a hand on the Irishman's shoulders, and cut the blackness around him with the beam of his flashlight. They were in the records storage area, a vast, low-ceilinged chamber which ran parallel to the ancient boiler room and cellars on the ground floor of the bank. Wooden file cabinets stood in rows higher than their heads, and the walls were shelved and lined with musty ledgers and lock-boxes bound with metal strips.
Peter could taste the dryness on the air; it was as if the very act of their breathing had stirred dust motes lying undisturbed for decades.
The silence was complete. Peter examined it in layers, letting his ears test first the quiet of the storage area, then the adjoining cellars and boiler rooms, and finally the vault floor above their heads.
The only sound he heard was Francois's erratic breathing. Peter squeezed the Irishman's shoulders, and moved off swiftly towards the front of the bank, following the bright, narrow path traced by his flashlight. The door sealing the storage area was tall and massive, patterned with squares of deeply carved wood. It was very old, and so was its lock, and Bendell solved the problems of its tumblers in seconds with a thin screwdriver wrapped in a handkerchief. Peter let the door swing slowly open of its own weight, and peered through a crack into the foyer of the bank.
The foyer extended the full width of the building, abutting directly on to the street, its tall arched windows and doors laced with grille work and covered now with drawn green shades. The side walls of smooth, veined marble were flanked by tubs of dark green plants, strange and exotic in the gloomy darkness, and they gave off an earthy, verdant odour that was jarringly alive after the dry, dead air of the records room.
From the middle of the foyer a broad marble staircase rose to the second floor of the bank, eighteen worn steps with brass handrails on either side of them.
On the sidewalk, in front of the massive double doors, stood a detail of police; Peter could see their figures silhouetted against the long green shades.
Peter opened the door enough to slip through it. With an eye on the double doors at the entrance of the bank, he ran at a half-crouch to the foot of the stairs. He sat on the first step, a valise and tool kit in his lap, squeezed himself close to the hand-railing, and went up the stairs backward, easing himself from one step to the next, like a child who hadn't learned to walk, but keeping his eyes fixed all the while on the silhouetted figures of the police in the street. Francois came after him, and then Bendell and the Irishman, and there was no sound at all but the rough whisper of heavy trousers on cold marble.
On the second floor, safe from view, Peter stopped again to test the silence. Nothing moved, nothing stirred, except dust motes dancing in the dim light. There were faint traffic noises, and the distant noise of the fiesta from the street, but the air around them was as still and quiet as that in a tomb.
The second floor of the bank was vast and dim. The murky sunlight that filtered through the green shades on the windows coated everything with a translucent gloss; the rows of empty desks and ancient typewriters, the shining marble flooring and the great steel door of the vault, all shimmered with pale marine illuminations.
In the heavy, oppressive silence, an old-fashioned wall clock ticked solemnly and sturdily, its pendulum swinging with a sense of inevitability behind a glass door brightened with golden lettering advertising an insurance company. Peter flicked a glance at his Patek-Phillipe. The wall clock was slow, by almost forty-five seconds.
"Let's hit it," he said.
They hurried to the vault and commenced work with an apparently effortless precision and economy. Peter flipped open the two valises, while Bendell spread a long and narrow strip of chamois-cloth, arranging drills and bits and braces in the order they might need them, his hands moving as deftly and precisely as those of a surgeon at an operating table. The diamond teeth that ringed the cutter bar gleamed in the dim light. Peter ran his fingertips over them appraisingly, and studied the massive door of the vault.
"It's a tricky brute," he said quietly to the Irishman. "If you smash the main tumbler links, they trip the auxiliaries."
The Irishman nodded. "True, lad. And if you smash those auxiliary bastards, they set off the emergency system."
"You must work backward," Bendell said. "First the emergencies. Then the auxiliaries. The main tumbler links last."
"Don't teach your grandfather how to suck eggs," the Irishman said, with a hard grin. He rubbed his hands together for a few seconds, and picked up a punch and drill. "How much time left, Peter?"
"One hour and forty-five minutes."
"It won't be a milk run, lad. Let's get cracking."
"Hold it one second." Peter turned to Francois. "Let's have it. This is as far as we go without it."
"But of course." Francois opened his jacket, removed the can of film from under his arm, and gave it to Peter with an ironical little smile.
"I'm satisfied with our bargain. Why shouldn't I be?"
Peter inspected the impress of his ring in the candle wax that smoothly sealed the locks and catches on the can of film.
"Okay, Paddy, hit it," he said, and put the film in his tool kit.
The Irishman began drilling. Peter went quickly through the gloomy night to the front windows of the bank. He moved a shade a half-inch with his fingertip, and peered out into an empty street shining with thin sunlight. This was the business district of the old town, and its buildings were sturdy and respectable, with barred windows and brass name-plates studded to the walls beside their doorways.
Twelve feet below Peter on the sidewalk in front of the bank was a detail of six policemen. Since the beginning of the fies
ta, there was no minute of the day or night when the doors of the bank were left unguarded; a round-the-clock security was maintained by severe, alert officers with holstered automatics in their belts, and whistles hanging on short chains from the epaulets of their tunics.
This was an area of the operation Peter had never been satisfied with, although he knew from observation that at this time of the morning the sunlight on the panes of glass silvered them like mirrors. In addition, the heavy squares of iron grille work on the windows would provide a shield for what he must do now; but he was still gambling recklessly on the strength of all the slender threads of chance. The fly buzzing about a policeman's ear, or the sudden crick in the neck, that could cause a man to turn suddenly and look directly up at the window Peter was working on.
Peter drew a deep breath, and held half of it, steadying himself as he would if he were about to squeeze off a shot on a target range. Then he opened the tool kit and picked up his glass cutter. He moved the shade, slipped his hand behind it, and made a swift, precise incision on the bottom of a pane of glass. After waiting a full minute, he covered the cut with transparent tape. One of the policemen looked along the street, his eyes roving about alertly. Peter let the shade swing gently back into place, an instant before the policeman turned and glanced up at the windows of the bank. This Peter didn't like; there was literally no defence against intuition. He knew the man hadn't heard or seen anything to rouse his suspicions. But nevertheless, his hackles were up.
Peter waited several minutes before peering out again, and then he cursed softly, for he had almost missed an opportunity to finish the job in complete safety. An old man, who was obviously drunk, had fallen in the gutter, and several of the policemen were assisting him to his feet, while the others watched their efforts with indulgent smiles. But even so, Peter was able to make two more incisions, along the sides of the pane, before the policemen returned to their posts in front of the bank. He was forced to wait fifteen more minutes before making the last cut at the top of the glass. In the middle of the pane he pasted an inch-long strip of tape, with one half of it sticking up in the air. This would serve as a door handle; when he pulled on it the pane would fall backward into his hand, hinged by the transparent tape along the bottom edge of the glass.
Peter closed his tool kit and stood perfectly still for a moment. Then he looked at his hands. They had not quite stopped trembling.
The Irishman drilled four holes around the combination knob, lining them up at the cardinal compass points. Into these he inserted spring clamps which locked the diamond cutter-bar tightly against the surface of the vault door. Bendell screwed a short steel handle into the outer ring of the cutting rig.
"What's the time, Peter?" the Irishman said sharply. He had removed his jacket, and the back of his shirt was dark with perspiration. A tangle of thick black hair fell over his forehead. "Forty-eight minutes," Peter said. He was studying the notes he had copied from documents in the Museum of Archives, analysing certain measurements in relationship to the swinging needle of the compass he held in his hand.
"The emergency system's had it," the Irishman said. "But, lad, it's still a horse race."
Strain lined all their faces. Tension had seemingly charged and compressed the air; it was as if they were working under a bell, squeezed and cramped together, isolated from the world. There was a dry smell of dust, and steel shavings, and old documents around them, and another scent, acrid and sweet as jasmine, which told Peter that sweat was popping out all over Francois's body, coarsening the fragrance of his cologne.
Peter looked steadily at Bendell and the Irishman. "We're going to come through, lads. Trust me." He infused them with his own hard confidence, which was more glandular than realistic, for he believed they would come through, not because it was possible, but simply because they must. The Irishman drew a deep breath, gripped the handle on the rim of the cutter-bar, and threw his weight against it… Peter went swiftly through the dark basement of the bank, following the slender beam of his flashlight. He checked his compass, followed a wall to its intersection with another, and then dropped to his knees beside a manhole cover that was secured by a screw lock with a ten-inch bar running through it. He spun the bar until the clamps came loose, raised the manhole lid and climbed down an iron ladder into the storm drains that twisted under the bank towards the river.
Something ran between his feet, claws ticking on slimy stones. Peter flicked his light about and the long slender beam leaped along the drain, flashing on drops of moisture beading the curving walls, brightening the dark rivulet of water running through the trough in the floor of the tunnel. The air was oppressively damp and cold, fetid with the smell of moss and sunless earth. In the springtime, he knew from what he read at the museum, the drains were deep with swiftly running water from the melting snows in the foothills of the Pyrenees.
Now they were almost dry; the trickle in the bottom of the drain was hardly enough to dampen the old stones.
Peter followed the drain for perhaps a hundred yards, occasionally stopping to check his notes and compass. Within another fifty yards, the drain began to narrow; his head scraped against the rounded ceiling, and he went on at an awkward crouch, the beam of his torch describing an ever smaller arc between the compressing walls. At last he was forced to get on his knees and crawl, tucking the flashlight under his belt. After a dozen more yards the tunnel angled sharply right, and ran down to connect with another main drain. Light gleamed at the end of the tube which linked the two mains.
Peter flattened himself on his stomach and wormed his way down the connecting link for several yards, to make absolutely certain it was possible. He was wider in the shoulders than the Irishman and Francois, and he knew they could make it to the next main without any great difficulty.
The force of gravity was in his favour going down the slanting tube.
But it worked against him when he tried to back out; pushing himself uphill turned out to be nearly impossible, for the confines of the link prevented him from getting a reliable leverage with his hands and feet.
And there were cracks and ridges in the old stones which painfully scratched his knees and elbows, and impeded his progress, such as it was, by snagging his belt buckle, his flashlight, the buttons on his coat.
For a bleak moment he thought he might not make it. But he got out at last, and when he was free once more, his breath came harshly and raggedly, the sound grating against the damp walls. He had no love of stifling enclosures, and no affection at all for the creatures who had shared the tunnel with him, gaunt sewer rats whose claws made liquid, scratching noises on the slimy stones, and whose eyes were red and bold in the gloom beyond the range of his flashlight.
Peter backed out of the tunnel, stood when it widened, and ran along the drain to the ladder that led up to the basement of the bank. Time was now the destroyer; and the ticking of his watch seemed as fateful and ominous as the ticking of a bomb… The muscles in the Irishman's arms stood out rigidly. He was breathing hard, grunting as he turned the cutter-bar a fraction of an inch at a time, grinding fine diamond teeth deep into the steel of the vault. Bendell stood beside him, an appraising frown on his plump face.
"You should be close to the tumbler links."
"I should be in a pub on Grafton Street. How's the time, Peter?"
"Ten minutes."
"Good God!"
"Don't worry, we're on schedule," Peter said. "But listen: When the links break, you and Bendell will leave. I checked the route. It's clear. The second drain will take you out to the river a mile from town. Head for Biarritz and home, without wasting a second."
"And what about us?" Francois asked Peter.
"We stay and finish the job. We tie up the loose ends that can hang us."
"Very well." Francois shrugged, but there was a shine of sweat on his forehead, and the tic at the corner of his mouth was pulling rhythmically at his lips… At the front windows of the bank, Peter moved a shade with his fingertip, and loo
ked into the street. There was more traffic now: old women in dark shawls hurrying to Mass or market; tourists taking pictures in the clear fresh sunlight; a stream of merrymakers with drums and goatskins of wine on their way to the Plaza del Castillo. The police detail stood at attention, waiting for the relief which would appear at the stroke of eight o'clock.
This fact determined Peter's choice of time; in that split second of orderly commotion, when sergeants were barking commands, and tourists were taking pictures of the marching police, he had noticed a vacuum of security in which his plans would function with a minimal risk of detection.
He was preparing to let the shade fall back into place, when he saw a sight that made his mouth go dry.
The Cabezuda was coming along the street towards the bank, rocking from side to side, its staring eyes towering high above the heads of the crowd. Children laughed at it. Adults shouted good-humoured insults at the huge, comically splayed nose, the Gaming puffed-out cheeks. "Good God!" Peter said softly, and looked at his watch. They were three minutes early! What in hell had gone wrong? He cursed Angela, damning her piggishness, for that was the only explanation that occurred to him that she couldn't wait a last precious minute to get her hands on the diamonds. Peter ran back to the vault. They would need a miracle now he knew, for the Cabezuda wouldn't be allowed to loiter in front of the bank.
The Irishman's face was a damp, straining mask, and under pale skin the muscles in his arms were bunched like knotted ropes. "They're here,"
Peter said. "We can't make it!"
Francois looked as if he had been struck a heavy blow at the base of the skull. He shook his head weakly. "No, no, they can't be here yet.
It's not time."
Peter leaped to help the Irishman. Together they fought to turn the ring of diamond teeth against layered steel that had been forged to resist fires and explosions, to withstand anything but direct hits by bombs. Time became stretched and attenuated, until it seemed there was no time at all, but only the pain in their arms, the salty sweat in their eyes, the harsh noise of their breathing. And at last, there was an eternal interval, in which they hung their combined weight on the bar, hands slippery and weakening steadily, and it was then Peter realised that the great vault would not give way to their strength and prayers, that it had won and they had lost.
The Caper of the Golden Bulls Page 15
