not any he was confident in, and wanted her help. “None better.”
As they walked through the office, there seemed to be a lightened mood even though both the agents and support staff knew that long days were ahead. Kate suspected that with everyone in the Pentad out of the picture, the hunt for the money would be considerably less stressful. Unlike chasing murderers, looking for money became less a priority with each passing day. Kate tried to push her key into the lock on her office door, but it wouldn’t go in. “You didn’t have me evicted last night, did you, Don?” She tried it again and then bent over to examine the lock. “There’s something in it.”
Kaulcrick looked and then scraped at it with a fingernail. “Someone’s screwing with your lock. I’ll call Demick.”
Five minutes later Tom Demick was poking at the lock with a pick. “Looks like somebody superglued it.”
“How do we get in then?”
“Let me go get some tools. The walls around the door are panels. I’ll have to take them apart.”
When he returned, Demick took a small crowbar to the sections of metal frame around the door and pried them away. Then, after lifting the fiber wall panels away, he used a hammer to collapse the metal-rib wall supports. Once he did that the door and its frame loosened and fell into the room. “Jesus Christ!” Demick said, looking into the office.
The others stepped up around him to see. On the floor was a three-foot-high replica of the Portsmouth Naval Prison, constructed completely of banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills. The rounded turrets had been fashioned from fanned-out bundles held in circular tubes with rubber bands, the notched turrets with folded single bills. Where supportive corners were necessary, the ends of the stacks were riffled into one another like half-shuffled playing cards. Kate noticed that the courses were bonded in a staggered fashion, like bricks. No one said anything, but instead walked slowly around the structure, being careful not to touch it. Finally Kaulcrick said, “Get someone from the accounting squad up here.”
Four men came through the door and had the same reaction as everyone else, except for the older accountant, who was the one who had originally discovered the money missing. He walked around the structure analytically. “How much is supposed to be here?” he asked no one in particular.
“Three million,” Kaulcrick said almost before the question was out of the accountant’s mouth. “Give or take.”
The accountant took another pass and said, “I’m going to guess it’s closer to five million.”
“That’s not possible,” Kaulcrick said.
“There’s only one way to find out. We’ll start counting it.”
Demick said, “Hold on just a minute. I’ve got to get some pictures.” Kate couldn’t believe that Vail had recovered the money. And as anonymously as disrupting the bank robbery. Demick pulled out his cell phone and, circling the replica, started snapping photos.
Kate wondered why Vail had chosen to build the castle-like prison. Was it supposed to be a metaphor: stealing money gets you prison, or that money is a prison? Then she noticed on the parapet of the structure a one-dollar bill folded into the figure of a woman. She was wearing a floor-length dress; her arms were extended out to her sides gracefully, the left wrist turned upward. Now she wondered if Vail’s message might be that it was she who was imprisoned by her career. Whatever it was, coupled with his dramatic absence, she was sure that he wouldn’t be taking the director’s offer of reinstatement.
Kaulcrick was watching the accountants intently, and when he realized that they were calculating beyond three million dollars, he said, “It can’t be more than three million.”
That’s when Kate noticed that her computer was on. She never left it on. She moved the mouse and the screen lit up. There was a typed message. She read it out loud: “‘What’s the difference between the ashes of two hundred bundles of hundred-dollar bills and the ashes of two hundred bundles of one-dollar bills?’”
The head accountant pondered the riddle and said, “So instead of two million dollars being burnt, it was just twenty thousand dollars.”
Kate answered. “Of course. Radek knew we’d analyze the ashes but wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between one-dollar bills and hundreds. Same weights of paper, same amount of ink. He just had the hundreds on top to fool us.”
At the bottom of the page was a link for a dollar-bill origami Web site. She clicked onto it and a full-page