Sergeant Verity and the Blood Royal

by Francis Selwyn

  The absurdity and injustice of it struck him equally. He knew that his logic must be right, and even if he could clear the lock of the setting he had just chosen, there was no hope of finding one other combination from a million possibilities. Yet he was sure of the setting which he had seen Willson Moore use in opening the door that morning. His teeth were set with rage, when suddenly he relaxed, guessing that in his confusion he had forgotten to turn the spindle once more to the right to draw back the bolt. That must be it, surely.

  The milled metal turned easily in his grasp, he took the bar and felt the heavy door move slowly. There was no need to pull it wide, a couple of feet would be space enough for what he required. The stronghold was a vast blackness before him. He realized with relief that it was unlit because there were no spy-grills into it, and nothing which he did there would be seen. Evidently, its builders had decided that any breach at this point in the massive walls must endanger the inner vault.

  Dacre closed the steel door behind him without locking it. Then he felt his way forward to the corner where the six boxes had been stored that morning. He had taken great care over the order in which the boxes were loaded and as his hands examined the gloss of lacquered wood in the darkness, he knew from certain marks carefully made upon it that the first coffin-shape he had come to was the one he wanted.

  He broke the wax seal and, fumbling at his belt, found the little key for the lock. The lid creaked open and his hands touched the metal shutter of a dark lantern and felt the rattle of sulphur-tipped matches. In a moment more, the rising glow of the oil lamp cast its wavering tawny light upon the walls of the stronghold. With a savage satisfaction, Verney Dacre thought that his enemies had delivered themselves into his hands. The power of the time-lock and the million combinations had fallen to his first assault. Before him in the open box lay the tools of his trade. The vault door in the stronghold wall was secured only by a Yale Double Treasury Lock, so sure were the authorities that no burglar would ever negotiate the time-lock and combination-bolt. The Double Treasury Lock would have deterred any cracksman of average skill, but Verney Dacre looked at it and chuckled.

  The lock presented a steel surface, approximately a foot square, with two keyholes. It was only to be expected that this final door, behind which lay the treasure of the Mint, should require two keys to open it, each held by a different man. Dacre was acquainted with the inner working of a Double Treasury Lock. The massive bolt was held closed by the enormous pressure of a steel bit. Two levers on pivots slotted into this bit and, in turn, maintained it in position. Each lever was controlled by three interlocking cog-wheels.

  The first cog-wheel, in each case, could only be moved by the turning of the correct key in the lock. When this happened, the first of the pivot levers was freed. When the second was freed as well, by the second key, the steel bit yielded to the weight of the bolt and the door was unlocked.

  As a further precaution against unauthorized copies being made of the keys, the keys and locks could be altered easily. Each key consisted of a shank and the two extreme teeth. The remaining teeth of the key were held in place on a screw and could be rearranged or altered in number according to any adjustments of the lock. Dacre was undismayed. He took from the open box a key of just such description with an assortment of teeth. In the normal way, a burglar might have 'smoked' the lock, inserting a length of carbon-smeared wire to measure the distance of the tumblers. But any trace of carbon or soot in the mechanism would reveal the trick when the authorities began to investigate the theft. Moreover, a lock as sophisticated as this one required more subtle measurement.

  Dacre had followed the career of James Sergeant, locksmith extraordinary, with considerable interest. The year before, he had given his attention to imitating Sergeant's achievement in the construction of a micrometre, designed for mapping the interior of a closed lock. Dacre had never seen Sergeant's device but he knew enough of it to believe that his own resembled it in general appearance. It had a watch-face as dial, the single hand controlled by two interlocking cogs on the face itself and measuring the distances of the lock, where the shaft of a key would enter, down to a hundredth of an inch. Sergeant claimed to have measured the ten-thousandth part of an inch. Dacre was less exacting.

  From the outer cog there projected a thin probe, more slender than the barrel of a key, with a single tooth at its far end. Dacre cased it into the first opening of the Double Treasury Lock, the movement of it turning the little cogs and the hand on the watch-face until it met the obstruction of the first tumbler. He made a mental note of the reading. Turning the shaft on its side and then upright again, to negotiate the tumbler, he eased it forward until it encountered the next tumbler. Again he noted the reading. By the end of his investigation he had determined the position of the five tumblers which must be raised to turn the key and open the lock.

  Next he took his key and fitted it with the smallest teeth, all of the same size. None of them even encountered the tumblers. He worked up, one size at a time, until one of the teeth raised the lever of the first tumbler. He could tell which one it was, partly by the feel of the key as he turned it and partly by the bright scratch-mark on the tooth of the key where it had scraped its carefully-polished surface against the other metal.

  Keeping that tooth in place, he increased the size of the others until all five matched the tumblers of the lock. Last of all, he turned it and felt the wheels of the lock move. It was still impossible to open the vault door, until the second lock had been treated in the same way. Dacre worked, silent and intent, hearing occasionally a distant sound which might have come from as far away as the street or as close as the outer corridor of the Mint, on the far side of the fortress-like wall. The vault door set into it was about five feet high and Verney Dacre guessed he would be lucky if he could so much as stand upright in the interior.

  He turned the second makeshift key and felt the door set free by the opening of the bolt. The yellow lamplight shone into a space which looked more like a sepulchre than anything he had ever seen. Like the coffins of the dead, though large enough only for dead children, the locked boxes of finished coin awaited despatch to the banks of New York or Washington, St Louis or Philadelphia itself. Each one was secured by Linus Yale's inset cylinder lock. As Dacre told himself, a man who had come this far could hardly afford a glance at the chests of mere silver coin, assembled to one side. A fellow must pay his way in gilt. Somewhere else, in another stronghold and another vault, there was no doubt a stock of uncoined gold and unstamped planchets, but even these were nothing in comparison with the treasure before him.

  Dacre had promised Joey a couple of million in coined gold, not believing in so much but hoping to keep the youth's spirits high. Now, as he surveyed the bank boxes, counting twenty-eight of them, Dacre swore that he must have spoken truer than he could have known. Golden Eagles at twenty dollars a touch! Two or three thousand dollars in each pound's weight! Twenty-eight boxes with thirty pounds or more in each! He cursed aloud in his joy!

  The boxes had not yet been bound with steel bands and sealed across the lock with the Mint's stamp. That would happen when they reached the weighing-room on their departure. But the weight they now held would already have been checked, and Dacre knew that it must not alter.

  First he examined the locks, and once more confronted the skill of Linus Yale. Each box had its individual lock, opened by a flat metal key. Instead of the conventional tumbler mechanism, the entire lock turned with the key to open the box. But the edge of the flat key was a mass of peaks and indentations, indicating an array of pins of different lengths, all of which had to be lifted simultaneously to free the lock. To have picked twenty-eight such locks would have taken even Verney Dacre a very long time. But he had twice dissected such a device, bought for the purpose, with the loving care which a student of anatomy might have given to a choice cadaver. The locks would not be closely examined again until they reached the banks. That being so, he could open them in a few minutes.
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br />   Returning to his array of tools, Dacre chose a craftsman's drill and fitted a small diamond-headed bit to it. He crouched before the first box with its black-painted lock-plate. The chosen point was quarter of an inch above the slit of the key opening. The tip of the drill was no more than a millimetre in size. Supporting himself on one knee, his left elbow steadied on his other thigh, Dacre wound the drill against the metal plate with all his strength. The stark pattern of veins and sinews in his face and neck, the racking pain in his wrists, bore witness to the exertion. But it was at this point that a tiny hole drilled through the mechanism would cut through the pins holding the lock closed. Once they had been defeated, a plain flat strip of metal inserted in the lock would turn it and open the box.

  One after another, he attacked the boxes, disguising the holes afterwards by rubbing in soft black wax. The bit squealed against the last metal plate and, as if in response, he heard a shout close by, hardly further than the other side of the wall. Dacre froze and listened. The shout came again, and then a braying laugh. He let out another long breath, knowing that it was probably two or three drunkards in the street, making their way raucously home. How the sounds carried to him he could not tell. There must be ventilators and grills, as well as the system of flues. He was conscious, above all, of the ease with which any sound of his own might be heard.

  The boxes, their lids standing back, revealed the canvas bags of coin. Before going further, Dacre went to his own box and took out a pair of clean gloves which fitted tightly over his hands. He drew a double pair of stockings over his feet and wiped any traces of soot from the handles he had touched. Then, from the same box, he chose a pair of brass scales and a pile of large bags in coarse stout canvas, the colour of cooked gruel. It was as he was doing this that he heard, far off, the chimes and strokes of midnight. It was a shock that he had been absorbed for so long with the locks and he knew that he must work desperately against time to complete the task that remained.

  Opening the other five 'royal' boxes with his key he shone the lamplight on shifting piles of pale grey lead shot. This could be added, little by little, to make up exact weights. But for the bulk of the weight which must remain in the bank boxes, he looked to the Mint itself. He thought first of the iron fire-bars in the furnace-rooms and then, as a possible addition, the spare five-pound and ten-pound weights which stood to one side of the weighing-room. He took several of the canvas bags and went in search of this ballast. Even if the spare weights and bars were missed in the morning, the first supposition would be that they had been moved for an official reason. What man, after all, would break into a Mint full of gold in order to steal iron bars?

  His first stroke of fortune had come in noticing that the bank boxes were marked with their weight, as were the bags of coin inside them. This made it easier and quicker to compute the amount of ballast needed to replace the gold. Dacre worked rapidly with scales and balance. He was surprised, despite himself, to find that some of the boxes had sixty or seventy pounds weight of gold coin and, by his guess, would hold a hundred thousand dollars or more in value. Dark and glowing in the rich oil-light, the coins trickled softly into the lined scale-pan. From there, Dacre poured them into the open 'royal' boxes, into the lined pouches waiting to receive them. By the time that he had exchanged the exact weights and closed the black-lacquered boxes, it had taken him more than an hour to accomplish the labour. In that time, working with the speed of a man who sensed the minutes passing all too vividly, he had packed the contents of almost nine bank boxes into his own.

  Twice more, Dacre went back to the furnace, the boiler, the weighing-room, searching for whatever ballast came to hand. At length he had emptied the remaining bank boxes, filled them to their previous weight with ballast and lead shot, and closed them once more. He locked the vault door with his makeshift keys, locked and sealed his own boxes, keeping back the seal to stamp the wax of the last one, having replaced its weight with coin. On the floor around him lay the small cloth and leather bags of the bank, heavy with coin and each seeming about the size of a large grapefruit. First wiping the sweat away where it gathered on the woollen rim of his Balaclava helmet, Dacre began scooping up these smaller bags and thrusting them into his own canvas sacks. Much of the weight of the coinage had gone into his black-lacquered boxes, but there were still more than two hundred of the pouches and bags, swollen with their two-pound weight of Gold Eagles. The latest figures for the Mint showed a production of eight million dollars in gold coinage every year. The rules of the Treasury required that a three-month reserve should be held in the vault. As Dacre dragged the first of the laden sacks toward the furnace shaft, he knew that this computation confirmed his guess. Two million dollars in gold.

  One after another, he dragged the loaded sacks across the weighing-room floor, knowing that this would obliterate any exact marks of the steps he had made. The amount of gold was more than he had imagined, its weight far greater. The nine sacks were too heavy to lift, perhaps because Dacre's thin, nervous body was shaking with fatigue as he pulled the last one to the dark, open furnace. He could have sworn that each seemed to hold more than a hundredweight and yet it was absurd that he could have moved half a ton of gold in this manner, let alone the amount now lying in the black-lacquered boxes. Almost dizzy with the labour and the exhilaration, he closed the steel door of the stronghold, turned the spindle of the combination-lock to the left, and heard the heavy bolt slam home.

  The long coil of rope was where he had left it, in the empty furnace opening. Dacre took the first of the smaller money bags from the sack and impaled it on one of the wire hooks with which his rope was equipped at twelve-inch intervals. He worked with the fury of demonic possession, racing to finish his labour of darkness before the first light of day should put an end to his hopes. Even with the rope uncoiled and every hook sunk into the canvas or leather of its respective pouch, there was still more gold left in the sacks.

  Abandoning the remainder for the time being, Dacre entered the black, sooty shaft, crawling upward on his side toward the vertical drop of the main chimney. He towed the laden rope after him, yard by yard, until he had gathered it at last just where the slope from the rolling-shop furnace joined the main upward shaft. Leaving the rope, he worked his way up the main chimney until he was once again level with its opening, looking out over the roof where the canvas tube of the banner fell away to the window-on the far side of Juniper Street.

  It was still dark, darker indeed than when he had first gone down to open the vault, since most of the gas lights had long been extinguished. Gently he pulled the rope upward, feeling the growing resistance as the weight of the moneybags began to rise clear of the side-shaft. At the worst, there would be no more than fifty or sixty pounds weight at any one time in the vertical drop of the main chimney. He saw the first pale shape of a canvas pouch rising towards him and seized it, tearing it from the wire hook. It was the work of a second to rip it open, tilt the seething mound of Gold Eagles into the tightened canvas chute, and listen to the hissing sound of their descent towards the window where Morant-Barham stood.

  As a final precaution, Joey was to receive the coins in a sieve lodged in a bucket of sand. Their arrival would make hardly a sound. Dacre paused a moment, long enough for them to be sieved out, then ripped open the second bag and disposed of its contents in the same manner. There was no time to do more than drop the empty bags into the chimney. They would not have moved easily in the canvas chute, and by falling directly to the bottom of the main stack, they would lie directly above the melting-shop furnaces and burn up within a few hours.

  One after another, Dacre emptied the bags and shot their coins into the canvas gulley. His limbs ached as he braced himself in the narrow chimney opening. But he knew, from the angle and tautness of the canvas banner, that the coins were rolling and slithering down its incline like water in a channel-pipe. He worked till his nails bled and his hands throbbed with the cold. It must have been two o'clock by the time that he be
gan to pull the rope upward, and a clock had struck three in the chill air before he felt a sudden yielding and knew that he had come to the last twenty feet or so of its length.

  There was no way of warning Morant-Barham that things had not gone quite as he intended, that the amount of gold required a second descent. Throwing the slack end of the rope before him, Dacre began to ease himself down once more inside the main stack.

  This time, at least, there were fewer money-bags to be hooked to the rope, yet in his exhaustion he seemed unable to match the passing of time. When the last bag was attached, he crawled once more into the sloping furnace shaft, holding the large empty sacks. At the joining of the main vertical shaft he tossed these down so that they might burn up the next morning with the discarded money-bags. Then, once more, he began to draw the rope up after him, coiling it at the joining of the two chimneys. With infinite weariness, he pulled himself up the main shaft for the last time, lodged himself at its top, and hauled on the rope.

  It was, ironically, almost the last of the money-bags, which eluded him. His numbed and aching fingers hardly tried to catch it. From far below him, echoing up the shaft, he heard the clatter of spilling gold as the coins burst from their bag. Dismally, he realized that they might have gone in every direction, scattering into all the rooms of the Mint which had fire or furnace openings. Equally, they might have fallen down into the dark chamber where the flues converged and where they would melt slowly and undetected.

  In any case, it was out of the question to go back. It was some time after four in the morning and at any moment the first light might streak the sky behind him. Dacre disposed of the last coins. He pulled himself up, thrusting the rope into the canvas chute, and sat on the chimney edge, his feet dangling outside the shaft. He was safe, at least insofar as he could not be seen from the street, a black figure against a black sky. And there was one final task to perform.