by Barber, Tom
After his passport was checked and stamped, he thanked the woman behind the desk and walked through Customs out into the Arrivals hall. There was the usual crowd gathered behind the cordon, drivers holding name-signs or family members eagerly waiting for loved ones or friends to appear, but he made his way past them all and headed to an ATM on the right, pushing his credit card into the slot and withdrawing sixty bucks. That done, he turned and followed the sign for the Airtrain.
The Airtrain was an over-ground service, connecting JFK to the city’s MTA subway system and Archer rode it over to Sutphin Boulevard, a hub of a station on the east side of Queens. The time here was five hours behind the U.K, so it was still only early afternoon, and the weather was beautiful, the sun shining over the sea of houses and buildings across Queens, the air warm and summery.
Inside the train, Archer stood still, looking out of the window, the sun shining down on him through the glass as he gazed out.
It was a beautiful day.
One that his father would never get to see.
At Sutphin, he bought a Metrocard for the subway and got onto an E train, which would head west through Queens and pass under the East River into Manhattan. It would take him all the way to Times Square, and the Marriott Hotel Cobb had booked him into. Archer sat alone on one of the blue benches, his bag beside him, one of only three people in the carriage, the other two sat down the other end, far away from him. They were underground, but the lights inside the carriage showed Archer’s features in the glass window across the carriage and he looked at his reflection. He took most of his looks from his mother, but the one characteristic he’d inherited from his father were piercing blue eyes.
He stared into them in the window across the train, and saw his father staring back.
Someone murdered him echoed in his mind.
And the train rumbled on towards the city.
*
The funeral had taken place the next day, Saturday, in a picturesque green graveyard across the East River in Queens. Seeing as his father had died in the line of service, the whole thing had already been organised and paid for by the Bureau, and there was a good turnout, lots of people he didn’t recognise, a couple he did. Archer was standing in his black suit, white shirt and black tie at the front of those gathered, looking over at the polished brown coffin held by levers over the freshly dug grave. He was the only family member present. High above, the sun was shining, not a single cloud in the sky. It was another beautiful day, a strange contrast to his mood. Hollywood liked to make it rain in situations like this, to match the mood or the lead character’s feelings. Life, however, often wasn’t that black and white.
The clergyman conducting the service began a final prayer and those gathered bowed their heads. Archer kept his head up, still staring at the polished wooden coffin, a series of bouquets of white flowers resting on the lacquered wood, small envelopes tucked amongst the flowers with personal notes written to Special-Agent-in-Charge James Archer. Looking at the coffin, his son pictured him inside. He hadn’t seen him in over a decade, but here they were, ten feet from each other, the last time they would ever be in such close proximity. He swallowed, as the clergyman approached the end of the prayer.
He suddenly sensed someone watching him. He looked up and saw a woman with dark-brown hair standing the other side of the freshly-dug grave. She was about his age, attractive and dressed in a dark work suit, but was staring at him with a strange look on her face. If anything, she looked tense. Worried. Concerned. Maybe a mix of all three.
They held each other’s gaze, brown eyes on blue, but that look of concern on her face didn’t diminish.
If anything, she looked almost scared.
Maybe she and Dad were friends, he thought. Probably colleagues in the Bureau. She looked the type.
Once the service had ended, Archer had taken one last look at the coffin, then turned and walked away. He moved slowly over the grass, headed towards the old gates that led out of the graveyard. He’d hailed a taxi here, and planned to head back into Manhattan. Someone had told him earlier that there was some kind of wake planned, but he wasn’t going to go. Right now, he just wanted to be alone.
But a voice called quietly from behind him, cutting into his thoughts and solitude.
‘Sam.’
He turned, and saw a man he hadn’t seen in over a decade approaching him, dressed in a black suit and tie over a white shirt. His name was Todd Gerrard, but all his friends called him Gerry. He and James Archer had been close friends, having come up in the NYPD together in the 80’s when the city was nowhere near as safe for a cop as it was now. Judging by his suit and demeanour, Gerry had moved on to bigger things. Archer noted streaks of grey in his brown hair, but he still looked in good nick, lean-faced and alert.
‘Hey Gerry,’ Archer said. ‘It’s been a while.’
Gerrard offered his hand, and the younger man shook it, as other mourners passed them.
‘Damn it’s good to see you kid,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you’d make it.’
Archer shrugged.
‘Here I am.’
Gerrard glanced around. ‘Where’s your sister?’
‘In D.C. She couldn’t get time off.’
‘Your mother?’
‘She’s gone. Two years ago. Blood clot in her lung.’
There was a pause. Archer started to walk on towards the gate, and his father’s old friend kept pace alongside him. There was a brief silence. Then Gerry broke it.
‘You want to grab a coffee?’ he asked.
Archer looked over at him. He decided he could probably use some company, especially with an old friend of his father.
Gerry read his expression and took it as affirmation.
‘C’mon, it’s on me,’ he said. ‘We’ve got some catching up to do.’
Twenty minutes later, they were inside a Starbucks coffee shop in Manhattan, on the corner of 35th and 7th Avenue. Gerry had driven them here. Inside the Bureau car, Archer had watched the streets flash past through the tinted windows of the black Mercedes as they drove through Astoria, over the Queensborough and then into Manhattan. Traffic was lighter considering it was the weekend and the journey was a relatively quick one, but neither man said a word during the ride. They were saving the conversation for over coffee.
Once Gerrard had parked near Herald Square and put a Bureau marker on the dashboard that would save him from being clamped, they had walked over and moved inside the coffee shop. Gerrard headed to the counter whilst Archer grabbed them a seat and a table across the room by the window, asking for tea instead of coffee. He couldn’t abide the black stuff. Once Gerrard had placed their order, the barista took a few moments to prepare the drinks then passed them over the counter. Gerrard paid and approached the table, taking a seat across from the younger man and placing the two cups on the table-top. Archer noticed that the older man had brought something with him from the car, an A4 sized yellow folder containing some white documents. He nodded thanks for his drink.
More silence followed. Archer looked out of the window, lost in thought, watching people walk past on the sunny street. Much like yesterday, today just felt surreal, as if it was a dream.
‘You’re looking well kid. Your dad said you’d ended up a cop in the UK?’ Gerrard asked.
‘Yeah. That’s right.’
‘Forget that, you should be a damn model with a face like that,’ the older man added, trying to lighten the mood.
Archer forced a smile, but said nothing.
‘Where are you staying?’
‘Marriott. Times Square.’
Gerrard whistled. ‘Who’s picking up the bill?’
‘My boss.’
Gerrard went to say more, but suddenly remembered something, and reached into his pocket, pulling out a pair of keys wrapped in a small piece of paper. He slid them across the table.
‘These are for your Dad’s place in Astoria,’ he said. ‘He’d been renting an apartment off 30th Avenue for the past few years. I
figured there might be some stuff there you wanted to…see. He was on a lease so there’ll be new tenants moving in there soon. I figured you’d be the best person to take what you want and leave the rest to be thrown out. The address is on the paper.’
Archer nodded and took the keys and scrap of paper, tucking them into his pocket, saying nothing. Light guitar music flowed from speakers around the Starbucks, filling the moments of silence between the two men, and people chatted and tapped away on laptops around them, all sorts of ethnicities enjoying all sorts of different drinks and specials from the counter. It was busy with weekend activity, but the coffee shop still felt relaxed.
Archer looked down at his tea, at the circular green Starbucks logo printed on the side of the cup. A mermaid wearing a crown, two stars either side of her, with the company’s name printed in a semi-circular shape underneath.
‘Shit, I’m sorry, Sam,’ Gerrard said, sighing. ‘Jimmy didn’t deserve to go out like that.’
‘No. He didn’t.’
‘When was the last time you saw him?’
Archer glanced out the window.
‘About eleven years ago.’
‘He always talked about you, you know. He was proud. That terrorist thing in London at Christmas? He wouldn’t stop going on about it. It made the front page of the New York Times. When it was over, he kept saying that’s my son, my son did that. He was real proud of you, you know.’
‘No. I didn’t know.’
There was a pause.
Archer loosened the long black tie around his neck and unbuttoned his top button, then lifted the white cap off his tea. Steam swirled up from the cup, the water tinted and infused. He lifted the string on the bag and dunked it up and down, watching the water darken as it soaked up the tea leaves inside the bag.
He dropped the bag inside and watched it sink to the bottom. His mood felt just as low.
‘I know he screwed up,’ Gerrard said. ‘Made some mistakes. But he turned his life around, Sam. He quit the booze. He joined the Bureau. Neither one is easy to do. He hadn’t taken a sip in almost two years.’
Archer listened but didn’t respond. He looked back out the window again, at the people walking past on the street, each with their own cares and concerns.
There was such a wide variety of people out there. Tourists distracted as they looked at maps and tried to establish their bearings, looking for the way to Macy’s or the Empire State Building over on 34th and 5th. Locals accustomed to the sights, dodging and stepping past them. A young street busker on the corner, singing and strumming a guitar, people tossing the odd coin or spare dollar note into the open guitar case beside him. This place really was a melting pot. If he took a photo right now, he could probably point out about fifteen or twenty different nationalities.
But despite the wandering meander of his mind, a voice was constantly echoing in there, a voice he couldn’t shake, as if someone had shouted into a cave and three words kept reverberating back to him.
The echo was saying the same thing over and over again, three words, five syllables.
Someone murdered him.
‘How long are you in town for?’ Gerrard asked.
‘Till next Sunday. A week tomorrow,’ Archer said.
He shifted his gaze from the window to Gerrard, sensing something in his voice.
He looked like he had more to say.
‘Why?’
‘Did you speak to anyone about the murder? Or read the coroner’s report?’
‘No. But I know what happened. Twelve gauge, point blank, back of the skull. Took most of his head off. No suspects, no witnesses. The FBI is handling the investigation and its going absolutely nowhere. Why?’
Gerrard looked across the table at him.
Didn’t speak.
‘Why, Gerry?’ Archer repeated, his face hardening. ‘Don’t waste my time.’
Gerrard nodded.
‘Because I think I know who pulled the trigger,’ he said.
FIVE
‘Do you know when the first documented bank robbery in New York City took place?’ Gerrard asked.
Archer shook his head, watching the other man closely. He considered cutting in and pressing Gerrard for the information he wanted immediately, but figured this had to be related somehow.
‘No. I don’t.’
‘1831. City Bank, on Wall Street. Workers turned up on Monday morning and found two hundred and fifty thousand dollars missing. To this day, we’ve only got back about three quarters of that cash haul. And it’s been them versus us ever since. It started with steam trains and Federal reserves, now its armoured trucks and bank vaults. Cops and robbers, Butch and Sundance, Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde, you know the names. We all do. I’m head of a Violent Crimes detail downtown in Federal Plaza. A six man team, including myself, in a squad called the Bank Robbery Task Force. We’re in charge of all the major bank robbery investigations in New York City, in each of the five boroughs.’
He cast his arm in the direction of the window.
‘This place is a dream target for bank robbers, Sam. There are thousands of banks here, endless escape routes and the wealth of this city means thieves know every bank is guaranteed to be stocked up with cash.’
He paused to drink from his coffee, then continued.
‘Most people who try to hold up banks are either incredibly dumb or incredibly desperate. They don’t think clearly or rationally. No disguises, no weapons, no real plan. Every witness inside the bank can I.D them later, and even if they can’t, every security camera in the building documents the whole thing. Some of the more stupid thieves even look up, staring straight into the lens, no mask, no disguise. No common sense. No chance of success.’
Archer drank from his tea and nodded, watching the older man closely.
‘The most common M.O is a note-job, where a thief will slide a note to the teller,’ Gerrard continued. ‘On the paper, they write Give me all the cash in the register or I’ll shoot you, shit like that. Tellers have a protocol for this. They always hand over the cash, but most of them have panic-buttons by their feet, silent-alarms that go straight to the NYPD. They push that whilst stalling and complying with the robber’s demands, and the thief will walk outside to find an entire police precinct waiting for him. And if the teller doesn’t have a panic button within reach, they’ll hand over the cash but include bait money or dye packs deliberately camouflaged and placed within reach. Once the thief tries to leave, a transmitter reacts with a radio by the door and detonates the dye. The money is ruined, and the thief is covered with the red dye which is an absolute bitch to get off. They’ll spend the next three days trying to scrub it off their skin, and by the third day pretty much every one of them is doing it in handcuffs.’
He shook his head.
‘Most of these people are complete clowns. The NYPD gets pretty much all of them the same day as the heists and retrieve the stolen cash. Those security protocols I mentioned have been incredibly effective, especially in this city. At the end of the last decade, things were going real good. Our clearance rate was going up and up, and the heists were going down. In 1979, the Bureau logged 319 separate incidents of bank robbery in the five boroughs of New York City. By 2010, there were only 26.’
He paused, sipping his coffee again. Archer listened closely, intrigued.
‘Any bank robbery in the Unites States is classed as a Federal crime, which means we automatically get involved and take over jurisdiction,’ Gerrard said. ‘We normally work together with local law enforcement and put together a team of FBI agents and local P.D in each town and city. We had the same thing going here, but things were going so well that the NYPD decided to pull their guys from the Task Force. We were six-and-six, half cops, half FBI. Well, the cops pulled their six guys from the detail, leaving our six FBI agents to handle the caseload themselves. They claimed that the crimes would continue to dwindle and that surely the FBI could handle the reduced number of heists alone.’
‘Getting
out when the going’s good,’ Archer said.
Gerrard nodded. ‘Exactly. They jumped ship. And since then, pretty much everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. It’s just been one thing after another. We’re in some seriously deep shit and it’s rising every day. The thefts are back on the rise, all over the city. And the people pulling the jobs are getting smarter. Even the idiots now know what to look for. Things got so bad last year that the Bureau pulled me from Washington and sent me up here to take over the Task Force and boost the clearance rate. Start catching these guys instead of constantly chasing after them.’
‘So have you?’ Archer asked.
Gerrard sighed and shook his head.
‘We’re down to 34 per cent, Sam. Thirty. Four. A third of our case load. It’s shameful. That’s an all-time low. Every other city across the United States looks to us to set an example. The Bureau has to publish a report to the public every quarter. The reports give exact details on all bank robbery crimes and statistics for each city in the country. Ours are the first people look at. And right now, those numbers are dismal. It’s causing a stir within the entire organisation, a black-eye on the face of the FBI. My team and I are catching hell for it. Soon people are going to start getting fired.’
He drained the rest of his coffee, shaking his head.
‘And there’s one crew that’s causing me all this grief.’
‘Who?’
Gerrard didn’t reply.
He just slid the yellow folder across the table instead.
Archer looked down at it.
‘Take a look,’ Gerrard said, lowering his voice. ‘They’re killing me, Sam. Every job they pull knocks us down a rung, in the reports and in the public’s estimation. They’re humiliating me, my team and the entire Bureau. We can’t get close to them. They’re taking New York City for millions.’
Archer looked at him for a moment, then lifted open the yellow folder. A series of paper-clipped files were inside, five separate documents, pulled or photocopied from police and Bureau department files. He thumbed through them and saw each separately-stapled stack had a mug-shot stuck to the top right corner of the page. Five separate profiles and rap-sheets.
